Is it possible on Firebase or Parse to set up something kinda like a cron job?
Is there a way to set up some sort of timed operation that runs over the stored user data?
For example, I'm writing a program that allows people to RSVP for lunch everyday. If you have RSVPed by noon, then you get paired up with somebody else who has also RSVPed. Using JavaScript, the user can submit their RSVP in the browser.
The question is, can Firebase/Parse execute the code to match everyone at 12:00pm every day?
Yes, this can be done with Parse. You'll need to write your matching function as a background job in cloud code, and then you'll need to schedule the task in the dashboard. In terms of the flexibility in scheduling, it's not as flexible as cron but you can definitely run a task at the same time every day, or every x minutes/hours.
Tasks can take 15 mins max to execute before they're killed, so depending on the size of your database or the complexity of your task, you may need to break it up into different tasks or make it resumable.
Just to confirm about Firebase:
As #rickerbh said, it can be done with Parse, but currently there is no way for you to run your code on Firebase's server. There are 2 options for you 2 solve this:
You could use Firebase Queue and run your code in Node.js
You could use a different library such as Microsoft Azure (I still haven't tried this yet, I'm not sure if it provides Job Scheduling for Android)
However, Firebase is working on something called Firebase Trigger, which will solve our problem, however it is still not released with no confirmed release date.
Related
I am trying to call an api every minute for ski lift status and check for changes. I am going to store the value of if the lift is open or closed in firebase (Real Time Database) and read to see if value from api is different and only update/ write to that node when it's a different value. Then I can set up a cloud function that will listen for database changes and send push notifications to the list of FCM tokens from that channel. I am not sure if this is the most efficient way, but I was going to set up scheduled functions to call the third party api.
I have been using these docs:
https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/schedule-functions
I was planning to do something like this:
exports.scheduledFunction = functions.pubsub.schedule('every 5 minutes').onRun((context) => {
CALL MY API IN HERE AND UPDATE DATABASE IF SNAPSHOT BACK IS DIFFERENT
});
I was wondering how would I run only between set times- say 8am-6pm EST. I am struggling to find anything about times to run. Should I just run the function every minute and then pause and resume by checking the time? In which case how does it know to keep checking the time when it is paused?
Firebase scheduled functions use Cloud Scheduler to implement the schedule. It accepts cron style time specifiers to indicate when a job should be run. The full spec for that can be found here. You will have to use ranges of numbers to indicate the valid times and frequency of the schedule. For example, you might use "8-18" in the hour field to limit the hours of execution.
I am working on a project that's supposed to send notifications to it's users when current date is equal to a given date specified by the user. So which firebase-function method is best suited for such kind of application: onUpdate, onWrite, onCreate or https.onRequest?
Note: the app or firebase-function should always check and compare the currentDate to the dates of every record in the database and send notifications if they match.
If I understand correctly that you want to regularly check if today's date (i.e. current date) is equal to a specific field date of one or more records in the database, you could indeed call a dedicated Cloud Function via an HTTP Request every day with an online CRON job like https://www.easycron.com/
You would then, in this Cloud Function, make a query to retrieve all records having this field equal to today's date and send a notification to the user.
If you give more details on your database structure and on the code you have already written, the community may be able to help you further.
PS: look also this answer from Frank van Puffelen: Cloud Functions for Firebase trigger on time?
I think I got a better site for this. Please try https://cron-job.org/en/. It's free and works / worked fine for me.
Thanks to everyone who spared there time to check out and possibly try to answer this question.
I am making a spam counter ( on Firebase ). What I do is I use database trigger on firebase cloud functions to increment a path (/counter/${uid}). This path will hold an integer for each user that other path will have a security rule that reference to it and check whether it exceed the limit. However, I would like to clear the counter once a day.
When I search on google I found official way of firebase to do this by using another Google cloud service to deploy cron job. However, I wonder if I use setInterval on cloud function instead would work. This task would only be a one line execution ( admin.database().ref('/counter').set({}) . And it is not so serious that if it were to skip once or twice of the execution due to some problem, it should be ok.
Thanks
The use of setInterval won't work, and it's not really ever recommended to do so. You can use setInterval to keep a function alive for some amount of time, but you will be paying for that time even if the function is just waiting. Also you are still subject to the way Cloud Functions will time out your function (default 60 seconds, max 9 minutes by special configuration).
Don't use setInterval as you'll be paying for un-used compute time.
Instead see this video on YouTube; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbE2PzvAMxA
They go into detail of how to setup a free-schedule service and setup a HTTP trigger that should achieve the result you're after.
All,
I'm looking for a good way to do some job backgrounding through either of these two services.
I see PHPFog supports IronWorks, but i need something more realtime. Through these cloud based PaaS services, I'm not able to use popen(background.php --token=1234). So I'm thinking the best solution, might be to try to kick off a gearman worker to handle the job. (Actually my preferred method would be to use websockets to keep a connection open and receive feedback from the job, rather than long polling a db table through AJAX, but none of these guys support websockets)
Question 1 is, is there a better solution than using gearman to offload the job?
Question 2 is, http://help.pagodabox.com/customer/portal/articles/430779 I see pagodabox supports 'worker listeners' ... has anybody set this up with gearman? Would it work?
Thanks
I am using PagodaBox with a background worker in an application I am building right now. Basically, PagodaBox daemonizes a PHP process for you (meaning it will continually run in the background), so all you really have to do is create a script that checks a database table for tasks to run, runs them, and then sleeps a bit so it's not running too many queries against your database.
This is a simplified version of what I have running:
// Remove time limit
set_time_limit(0);
// Show ALL errors
error_reporting(-1);
// Run daemon
echo "--- Starting Daemon ---\n";
while(true) {
// Query 'work_queue' table for new tasks
// Loop over items and do whatever tasks are associated with them
// Update row to mark task as completed
// Wait a bit
sleep(30);
}
A benefit to this approach is that it's easy to test via CLI:
php tasks.php
You will see all the echo statements come through in console as it's running, and of course it's much easier to do than a more complicated setup with other dependencies like Gearman.
So whenever you add a new task to the table, the maximum amount of time you'll wait for that task to be started in a batch is 30 seconds (or whatever your sleep time is). This is better and preferable to cron jobs, because if you setup a cron job to run every minute (the lowest possible interval) and the work you have to do takes longer than a minute, another cron process will start working on the same queue and you could end up with quite a lot of duplicated task work that could cause a lot of issues that are hard to debug and troubleshoot. So if you instead have either only one background worker that runs all tasks, or multiple background workers that work on different task types, you will never run into this issue.
I have a database where one entry is structured like so:
number_to_call date file_to_play
Using asterisk, I need to do the following:
1. Check the database daily.
2. If date matches that of today's, then initiate call on number.
3. Once phone has been picked up, play file_to_play.
Some general pointers on how I even begin to do this would be great.
Most of the applications that I have written so far have worked on incoming calls. I have the following questions:
1. How do I write a "daemon" that will check the database? Asterisk should have both user and group privileges for it to execute properly. How do I do this?
2. Can I initiate an outgoing call from outside of the asterisk dialplan?
The calls are being made to a PSTN/mobile number.
You can Write any script Which can check DB on daily basis and once it maches the date range you can initiate a call using .call files.
Please study asterisk auto-dial out from voip-info.org - I think you can understand better then.
You can run your script for same user as asterisk runs there is also one more method to initiate call from linux which we can call Originate CLI command which can also refer to http://voip-info.org/.
In general it is not a great idea to write your own dialer, unless your volume is very very low. Where I work, we started rolling our own but at the end went with a commercial solution that handled most of the logic. There are a number of commercial and free solutions out there, so don't reinvent the wheel.
See my answer to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11666755/outbound-dialer-using-asterisk/14589901#14589901 for why it is not a good idea to roll your own.