Nodejs cron plugin vs running nodejs script from crontab

Question

I'm building a tool where users can enter a number of items they are interested in. Every 24 hours I want to run a script that checks certain JSON responses from external sources for these topics.

My question is: why would you make a script and run it using crontab rather than making a module using the node-cron plugin and include it in your app.js file. Or would you never do this?

Basically want to go for best practice on this one.

Answer 1

The main difference between the two methods in my opinion would be the level at which you want to schedule job. When using crontab your jobs are scheduled by the cron daemon that runs on the system.

node-cron on the other hand is a pure JavaScript implementation of cron. So system is not responsible for running jobs but your V8 engine which executes it. Jobs will be run as long as your js application runs.

So why would you use one or other ?

That depends on the purpose of your job, where is it best tethered . If job is a maintenance job for system run it via crontab. If you want to run a function in node.js periodically use node-cron. If you want to run a bash script you would want to use crontab. So how you want to do it via system (bash) or JavaScript is upto you.