View Source Cron Management

Intro

Tarearbol provides a simple but robust support of cron-like jobs scheduling. The approach is to spawn a process for each job to be completed under Tarearbol.DynamicManager supervision. Tarearbol application does not start the Tarearbol.Scheduler automatically, the target application must include it into it’s supervision tree explicitly.

Jobs description are loaded upon application start from one of the following locations:

  • project section of the Mix.Project, key :tarearbol, subkey :jobs
  • config entry in Config script, key :tarearbol, subkey :jobs
  • .tarearbol.exs file in the root folder of the target project (the path to the file might be configured in project section of the Mix.Project, key :tarearbol, subkey :jobs_file)

Tarearbol.Scheduler understands cron format. It exports three handy methods from Tarearbol.Crontab module, Tarearbol.Crontab.next/3, Tarearbol.Crontab.next_as_stream/3 and Tarearbol.Crontab.next_as_list/3. The first might be used to get the timestamp of the next event by cron record, the second to greedy evaluate all the next events for the year and the last one to return a Stream lazily evaluating next events.

Job Management

Tarearbol.Scheduler was created mostly for the single-node application, but it might be easily extended to manage jobs on several nodes.

Upon start, it loads jobs schedules and spawns processes for each, managed by Tarearbol.DynamicManager. Each job must return on of the following three outcomes.

  • {:ok, any()} to normally return the result to be stored as last job execution result in the state of Manager and reschedule the job to the next event
  • :halt to prevent further job executions and remove it from the list of scheduled jobs
  • {{:reschedule, binary()}, any()} to reschedule the job with new cron record, given as the second parameter of the first tuple.

Extra Sugar

Tarearbol.Calendar exposes two functions stolen from Rails: