Scheduled Jobs

A scheduled job runs your code on a recurring schedule. Think data syncs, report generation, cleanup scripts — anything that runs periodically and exits.

Deploy a scheduled job

The deploy flow is the same as a web service, with two differences:

1. Choose Scheduled Job as the app type
2. Set a cron schedule (e.g., 0 */6 * * * for every 6 hours)

Your code is built the same way, but instead of running continuously, it runs on your schedule and exits when done.

Cron schedule format

Standard cron syntax with five fields:

┌───────── minute (0-59)
│ ┌─────── hour (0-23)
│ │ ┌───── day of month (1-31)
│ │ │ ┌─── month (1-12)
│ │ │ │ ┌─ day of week (0-6, Sun=0)
│ │ │ │ │
* * * * *

Common examples:

Schedule	Cron expression
Every hour	0 * * * *
Every 6 hours	0 */6 * * *
Daily at midnight	0 0 * * *
Weekdays at 9am	0 9 * * 1-5

Differences from web services

	Web Service	Scheduled Job
Runs	Continuously	On schedule
Gets a URL	Yes	No
Auto-scaling	Yes	No
Build process	Same	Same
Environment variables	Yes	Yes

Configuration

Same as web services — environment variables, Procfile, and build settings all work the same way. The only addition is the cron schedule.