In this article, you will learn how to schedule a job in Node using node-cron.

Node-cron is a handy npm package which you can use to schedule jobs to run at specific times or intervals. It is most suitable for scheduling repetitive jobs such as email notifications, file downloads, and database backups.

Even if you are not interested in scheduling a job in Node, you may still find the knowledge you gain from this article about cron syntax very useful.

For example, Github Actions uses cron syntax when scheduling a workflow to run at a specific time. Similarly, cloud platforms such as Google Cloud require cron syntax when describing job schedules.

Node-cron is written for node in pure JavaScript and it is based on GNU crontab syntax. Though it is based on crontab, our focus in this article will be on learning node-cron and cron syntax.

For more about cron, crontab, and how they are used in Unix-like operating systems, you can take a look at this Wikipedia article on the topic (but you don’t have to know it to follow along with this article).

What you will learn in this article

By the end of this article, you will be able to do the following:

• Explain the cron syntax
• Schedule jobs using node-cron

#node #nodejs #javascript #npm #webdev