How to schedule Heroku's (maintenance mode or recharge) at specific time of the day?

Question

I'm trying to keep my Heroku (free) application awake during daytime. I don't really care if it sleeps late at night.

The old technique of continuously pinging the app is no longer a valid solution because since 2015, all free-app's have to sleep at least 6 hours a day.

I'd like to know if any of you guys figured this out before.

I need to schedule the recharge state or maintenance mode in a specific time range.

Let's make this question and an up-to-date resource of accomplishing this task.

Please submit only constructive ideas.

Answer 1

You can just scale it down for the six hours you want it to be asleep:

heroku scale web=0

Then scale it back up when you want to wake it up:

heroku scale web=1

There are a lot of ways to implement this; a script on some other machine would work fine, but you could probably also use the Heroku Platform API and a scheduler service:

• https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/platform-api-reference#formation
• https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/scheduler

disclosure: I'm the Node.js Platform Owner at Heroku

Answer 2

There is also this add-on: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/process-scheduler

At first I thought it wasn't working as it doesn't seem to necessarily run right at the top of the hour, but other than that it's been working really well for me and allows me to sleep my app overnight.