You’ll likely want to run various recurring tasks associated with your server. In the past, this may have been done utilizing cron, but it can be frustrating to have your scheduling logic disconnected from your code. To make this easy, Alchemy provides a clean API for scheduling repeated tasks & jobs.

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Scheduling

You can schedule recurring work for your application using the schedule() function. You’ll probably want to do this in your boot() function. This returns a builder with which you can customize the frequency of the task.

struct ExampleApp: Application {
    func boot() {
        schedule { print("Good morning!") }
            .daily()
    }
}

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Scheduling Jobs

You can also schedule jobs to be dispatched. Don’t forget to run a worker to run the dispatched jobs.

app.schedule(job: BackupDatabase())
    .daily(hr: 23)

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Schedule frequencies

A variety of builder functions are offered to customize your schedule frequency. If your desired frequency is complex, you can even schedule a task using a cron expression.

// Every week on tuesday at 8:00 pm
app.schedule { ... }
    .weekly(day: .tue, hr: 20)

// Every second
app.schedule { ... }
    .secondly()

// Every minute at 30 seconds
app.schedule { ... }
    .minutely(sec: 30)

// At 22:00 on every day-of-week from Monday through Friday.”
app.schedule { ... }
    .cron("0 22 * * 1-5")

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Running the Scheduler

Note that by default, your app won’t actually schedule tasks. You’ll need to pass the --schedule flag to either the serve (default) or queue command.

# Serves and schedules
swift run MyServer --schedule

# Runs a queue worker and schedules
swift run MyServer queue --schedule
QueuesFile Storage