Question

Cronjob vs Scheduler for Heroku.

Answer 1

Sounds like you just need a periodic task to run once per day. The currently recommended way to do that at Heroku is to use the scheduler add-on:

Scheduler is an add-on for running jobs on your app at scheduled time intervals, much like cron in a traditional server environment.

A dashboard allows you to configure jobs to run every 10 minutes, every hour, or every day, at a specified time. When invoked, these jobs will run as one-off processes and show up in your logs as a process named run.N.

The basic process is pretty simple:

1. Set up a Rake task to do whatever it is you need to do:

   desc "This task does ..."
   task :your_task => :environment do
       # Do something interesting...
   end
   

2. Add the scheduler add-on in the usual manner:

   $ heroku addons:add scheduler:standard
   

3. Then add your new Rake task through the Heroku dashboard.

If you want to run your periodic task outside Heroku then set up a cron job to run the appropriate Rake task.