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Cron jobs

What are cron jobs

Cron jobs are a way to launch periodically an app. This is useful to launch R or Python scripts doing calculation before shutting off themselves. The Cron jobs section of the app details page will list cron jobs:

Cron jobs

You can create, edit or delete cron jobs from this section. Cron jobs have some settings:

Cron job settings

Choose a name, a status (active or inactive), and an interval:

  • Hourly will start the app each hour at a specific minute;
  • Daily will start the app each day at a specific hour;
  • Weekly will start the app each week on a specific day and time.

You can add several cron jobs for a same app.

Stopping an app

Danger

Please read this carefuly before creating your first cron job.

When an app is launched by a cron job, you have to stop the app from itself:

  • R and Shiny apps or scripts can be stopped with q();
  • Python and Dash apps or scripts can be stopped with sys.exit(0);
  • RPGM apps can be stopped with rpgm.quit().

If you don't stop/exit an app, R/Python will continue to run indefinitely. For example, running a hourly app for 10 hours would result in 10 instances running in the background and consuming the server CPU and RAM.