App Platform Cron...

Posted on May 12, 2025

I have a Rails app deployed trough App Platform, now I want to add scheduled cron to run a command every 30 minutes. I’ve followed the following tutorial…

github.com/DO-Solutions/app-platform-cron

I understand I have to add:

workers:
- dockerfile_path: Dockerfile
  github:
    branch: main
    deploy_on_push: true
    repo: <your-github-username>/app-platform-cron
  instance_count: 1
  instance_size_slug: apps-s-1vcpu-0.5gb
  name: docker-cron
  source_dir: /

To the appspec.yaml and then update it… which I did and it worked fine… but when/where do I put the command I want to run and the frequency?

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KFSys

May 12, 2025

Heya,

Currently, App Platform only supports scheduling code to run at pre-deploy time or after deploy time. If scheduling your job to run after deploy time, you can further select whether to run a job after a successful deployment or whether the job should be run if the app fails to deploy.

A workaround would be to use this:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/functions/how-to/schedule-functions/

Bobby Iliev

May 12, 2025

Hi there,

I’ve answered a similar question here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/scheduled-tasks-or-cronjobs-with-app-platform-worker

The cronjob repo example that you are referring is going to be useful if you want to setup an HTTP endpoint that you can hit with that service on a specific schedule. However if you are looking to setup a CLI command instead, you would need to modify that example repo so that you actually deploy your code as well rather than just the cron and curl commands.

What you could do indeed is just fork that repository and extend it so that you could also include your app in there and use the cron service as well.

Let me know if this helps!

- Bobby