Scheduling Jobs on a Sails.js Application

In one of my projects, there was a need to put scheduled tasks on my Sails.js application.

Agenda and node-schedule are my tools of choice when scheduling jobs on a Node.js app. What we will cover is how to add scheduling to our Sails.js application using node-schedule and agenda.

To get started let’s create our application:

sails new SailsScheduling
cd SailsScheduling

My approach to use node-schedule is to add some configuration on the bootstrap.js file.

npm install node-schedule --save

We will add a service to our Sails.js application. Services on a Sails.js application reside on the api/services/path.

Suppose that we implement a service that will send emails:

/**
 * Created by gkatzioura on 6/20/16.
 */

var send = function (text,callback) {

  sails.log.info("Should send text: "+text)
  callback();
};

module.exports =  {
  send: send
}

Then we add our job triggering code on bootstrap.js:

/**
 * Bootstrap
 * (sails.config.bootstrap)
 *
 * An asynchronous bootstrap function that runs before your Sails app gets lifted.
 * This gives you an opportunity to set up your data model, run jobs, or perform some special logic.
 *
 * For more information on bootstrapping your app, check out:
 * http://sailsjs.org/#!/documentation/reference/sails.config/sails.config.bootstrap.html
 */
var scheduler = require('node-schedule');

module.exports.bootstrap = function(cb) {

  // It's very important to trigger this callback method when you are finished
  // with the bootstrap!  (otherwise your server will never lift, since it's waiting on the bootstrap)

  var emailService = EmailService;


  var minuteJob  = scheduler.scheduleJob('* * * * *', function(){
    EmailService.send("Random text",function (err, result) {
      sails.log.info("Job executed")
    });
  });

  cb();
};

The next example uses agenda. Instead of rolling out our own configuration, we will use sails-hook-jobs which integrates wonderfully to our sails application as a grunt task.

npm install mongodb@~1.4 --save
npm install sails-hook-jobs --save

We need MongoDB 1.4 version for mongo-skin.

Agenda is backed by MongoDB. Docker users can issue:

docker run --name some-mongo -d mongo

And have a MongoDB server up and running.

The next step is creating the file config/jobs.js containing the configuration.

/**
 * Default jobs configuration
 * (sails.config.jobs)
 *
 * For more information using jobs in your app, check out:
 * https://github.com/vbuzzano/sails-hook-jobs
 */

module.exports.jobs = {

  // Where are jobs files
  "jobsDirectory": "api/jobs",

  // agenda configuration. 
  // for more details about configuration,
  // check https://github.com/rschmukler/agenda
  "db": { 
    "address"    : "localhost:27017/jobs",
    "collection" : "agendaJobs" 
  },
  "name": "process name",
  "processEvery": "10 seconds",
  "maxConcurrency": 20,
  "defaultConcurrency": 5,
  "defaultLockLifetime": 10000
};

The next step is to create the directory jobs on our API folder.
In order to add a job, we should create a JavaScript source file on the API/jobs folder.
Your file should have the ending Job.js. Pay special attention to this, as you do not want to spend hours figuring out what went wrong (like I did).

Our job would send an email every five minutes.

module.exports = function(agenda) {
  var job = {

    frequency: 'every 5 minutes',
    run: function(job, done) {
      EmailService.send("Test email",function (err,result) {

        if(err) {
          sails.log.error("Job was not executed properly");
          done(err);
        } else {
          sails.log.info("Agenda job was executed");
          done();
        }
      });
    },
  };
  return job;
}

There are definitely more tools out there for Sails.js scheduling. My personal choice is agenda, due to its approach to managing your jobs and integrating as a sails task.

You can find the source code on GitHub.