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Faable DeployScheduled Tasks & Cron

Scheduled tasks and cron jobs

A task runs one command of your app — node scripts/followups.js, python manage.py send_digest, npm run report — with the code, variables and volumes of its live deployment, and stops when the command ends. A schedule runs a task on a cron expression.

Tasks do not need your app to be awake. A task runs in its own instance, so a schedule keeps firing while the app sleeps and nobody has it open: it is the way to send follow-up emails, process a queue every few minutes, or build a nightly report.

Tasks and schedules are available on the Hobby and Pro plans.

From the dashboard

  1. Open your app in the dashboard  and go to the Tasks tab.
  2. Under Scheduled tasks, fill in:
    • Schedule (cron, UTC) — for example */15 * * * * for every 15 minutes. The form says it back in words before you save it.
    • Command — what to run, for example node scripts/followups.js.
    • Name (optional) — how the schedule shows in the list.
  3. Click Add schedule.

The list shows each schedule in words, its next run, and why a run was skipped if one was. Turn off pauses a schedule without deleting it; Delete removes it. Under Recent runs you see the last 20 tasks of the app — scheduled and one-off — with their status and output.

From the CLI

From your project directory (or with -a <app>), with the Faable CLI:

# Every 15 minutes
faable deploy schedule add --cron "*/15 * * * *" -- node scripts/followups.js
 
# Weekdays at 07:00 UTC, with a name
faable deploy schedule add --cron "0 7 * * 1-5" -n digest -- npm run digest
 
faable deploy schedule list
faable deploy schedule disable <id>
faable deploy schedule enable <id>
faable deploy schedule rm <id>

Everything after -- is the command, exactly as typed.

To run a command once, without a schedule — a migration, a backfill — use faable deploy run:

faable deploy run -- node scripts/migrate.js

It waits for the task and prints its output; --no-wait only queues it.

How schedules run

  • Cron, in UTC: five fields (minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week). Names such as MON and macros such as @daily are not accepted.
  • At most every 5 minutes. For anything more frequent, run the loop inside a worker.
  • No shell: the command is split like a shell would split it, but pipes, && and $VARIABLES are not expanded. To run several steps, put them in a script or an npm run script.
  • One run at a time per schedule. If the previous run is still going when the next slot comes, that slot is skipped. Missed slots are not replayed later.
  • Up to 1 hour per task (15 minutes by default, set with --timeout in seconds).
  • 10 schedules per app on Hobby, 50 on Pro.

Task minutes

Each task counts its duration rounded up to the minute: a task of 5 seconds is one minute. A project includes 500 task minutes a month on Hobby and 2,000 on Pro, one-off and scheduled tasks together. The Tasks tab shows the minutes used this month.

WordPress cron

A WordPress site runs its scheduled events (scheduled posts, plugin jobs such as backups or mail queues) on page views, so a site that sleeps would never run them. Faable keeps a schedule on every WordPress app that runs wp cron event run --due-now every 15 minutes. It shows in the Tasks tab as Managed by Faable, cannot be changed or deleted, and does not count toward your task minutes.

On the Free plan

The Tasks tab explains what tasks are and links to the plan page; schedules can’t be created. If a project goes back to Free, its schedules stop running but are kept, and they resume by themselves when the project is on a paid plan again.

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