Skip to main content

Cron Jobs

Cron jobs are used to run specific operations in your app based on a schedule.

You can define cron jobs within your Helm chart as a Kubernetes Job. Please use the following template and create a cronjob.yaml within your helm chart under templates/ directory. Feel free to change image name and other details based on your app.

In essense, this definition will run a specific docker container on the specified cron schedule.

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: hello
spec:
  schedule: '*/10 * * * *' #Cron runs every 10mins
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: hello
              image: busybox:1.28
              imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
              command:
                - /bin/sh
                - -c
                - date; echo Hello from the Kubernetes cluster
          restartPolicy: OnFailure
  • The schedule uses standard cron notation: min hour day month day-of-week.
  • Ensure the container image you use contains the commands you want to run (in the example, we use busybox which includes basic shell commands).

Use kubectl to inspect whether your jobs are running as per schedule. To learn more, visit Kubernetes docs

To use kubectl to inspect your app environment, see How to use LocalOps CLI.

Some relevant kubectl commands​

Please use these commands after you do update-kubeconfig as given here - How to use LocalOps CLI

To see all cronjobs

kubectl get cronjobs --all-namespaces

To see logs of a job

kubectl logs job/<JOB_NAME>

To see jobs spinned up by a cron job

kubectl get jobs -l cronjob-name=<CRONJOB_NAME> --all-namespaces