Node-Cron 2.0 is released!

Published at 2018/09/17 - - 2 mins read.

In February 2016 I created a script for task scheduling in node.js, then I decided to search about that and I find some libraries, but the libs are using many dependencies to execute schedule a task. I don’t think is necessary to use many dependencies to do a simple thing. So, I decided to create my first node.js module to learn more about node.js and how to release that at npm.

I created a simple script for job scheduling and shipped it. I’ve created a readme, generated a Github page and posted that at Reddis.

So was that my first node module was released! And because of that, I went to bed happy. To my surprise in the next day, I receive some comments… And many starts at Github. Wow! In the next day more stars, and more in the next day.

I received more than 200 starts and I was very proud of that, but with the stars, I started to receive some issues :). I’ve fixed the easy ones, and my focus was not on my project anymore…

After 2 years node-cron received 600+ stars and I realize that I probably have more code running in production environments through node-cron than the code that I write at my work. And because of that, I decided to write a new version of node-cron. And this is the release notes:

• Added timezone support: I added that through the lib tz-offset, a lightweight lib to handle timezones with JavaScript.

• Added a getStatus to the scheduled task: Now is possible to get the current status of a task.

• immediateStart is deprecated: The last parameter was a flag, and I think passing flags is not a good thing to do. So, I’ve moved and renamed the immediateStart flag(but still working at version 2.0) to the option scheduled, this way more options may be passed to the scheduled task, for example, the timezone.

• An internal refactor: Now a task may return a Promise this is node-cron best practice for two reasons. First: you may write async functions as non-blocking I/O is a best practice for node-js. Second: the status will be more consistent.

I know this is a very short list but is that now node-cron is a little better, and I may say:

Node-Cron 2.0 is released!