Cron Jobs Quickstart

The following guide will show you how to create a cron job on Vercel that executes every day at 5 am UTC.

• A Vercel account
• A project with a Serverless or Edge Function

1. Create a function

   Begin by creating a Serverless or Edge Function for your project. The function will echo the current time using the World Time API.

   Serverless FunctionEdge Function

   Next.js (/app)

   Next.js (/pages)

   Other frameworks

   app/api/cron/route.ts

   TypeScript

   TypeScriptJavaScript

   export async function GET() {
     const result = await fetch(
       'http://worldtimeapi.org/api/timezone/America/Chicago',
       {
         cache: 'no-store',
       },
     );
     const data = await result.json();
    
     return Response.json({ datetime: data.datetime });
   }

   For those using TypeScript versions below 5.2, it's important to adapt the code to import NextResponse from 'next/server' and use NextResponse.json for the response. This ensures compatibility with earlier TypeScript versions in Next.js applications. In TypeScript 5.2 and above, the standard new Response pattern should be used.

2. Create or update your vercel.json file

   Create or go to your vercel.json file and add the following code:

   vercel.json

   {
     "crons": [
       {
         "path": "/api/cron",
         "schedule": "0 5 * * *"
       }
     ]
   }

   The crons property is an array of cron jobs. Each cron job has two properties:

   • The path, which must start with /
   • The schedule property, which must be a string that represents a cron expression. In this example, the job is scheduled to execute every day at 5:00 am UTC

3. Deploy your project.

   When you deploy your project, Vercel's build process creates the cron job. Vercel invokes cron jobs only for production deployments and not for preview deployments

   You can also deploy to your production domain using the CLI:

   terminal

   vercel deploy --prod

Your cron job is now active and will call the /api/cron path every day at 5:00 am UTC.