Vanilla NodeJS Cron Job?

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Problem Description:

I want to do something in node at, say, midnight each day.

I see a lot of stuff pointing me to node-cron, and I see this article configuring a docker container to execute a script per a crontab

I want to 1. not use any external packages and 2. keep the script being executed inside the server code itself (i.e. I couldn’t have the docker container execute some other file on a schedule)

The use case is I want to update a cache on the server every day around midnight, and then, at more frequent intervals, use that cache for various things.

Solution – 1

You can use setInterval to run the code every hour and check if it’s around midnight

setInterval(() => {
  if (new Date().getHours() === 0) {
    // do stuff
  }
}, 1000 * 60 * 60 * 60)

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