[Ask IH]: How do you run cron jobs on Vercel or Netlify?

We've added a new section to the docs with cron job recommendations!

https://vercel.com/docs/solutions/cron-jobs

Lately i have been using Github Workflows to do scheduled things. I use it to trigger a daily webhook for doing nightly builds in Netlify, works like a charm and very easy to set up

Following up here,

I built Slater, a cron job service built explicitly for Next.js & Vercel. It's entirely free right now while I'm in early access. Just sign up for the waitlist on the homepage and I'll email you some info to get started.

It's essentially cron jobs as code that I automate the endpoints with.

You write code like this:

// pages/api/slater/[...slater].js

import { slater } from "[@slaterjs](/slaterjs)/next";
const config = {
  tasks: [
    {
      name: "helloWorld",
      schedule: "0 7 * * *", // 7AM
      handler: async (event, success, failure) => {
        try {
          const results = await fetch(
            "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1"
          );
          const data = await results.json();
          if (results.ok) {
            return success(data);
          } else {
            return failure(data);
          }
        } catch (err) {
          return failure(err); // sends 500
        }
      },
    },
  ],
};

export default slater(config);

and when you deploy to prod on Vercel, Slater will hit the endpoint according to the cron schedule you set (UTC time).

Check it out here: https://tryslater.com

If you have a node.js backend you can use node-schedule. The jobs don't persists so you need to store them in a database if that's needed.