Getting started with cron jobs

Learn how to schedule cron jobs to run at specific times or intervals.

This guide will help you get started with using cron jobs on Vercel. Cron jobs are scheduled tasks that run at specific times or intervals. They are useful for automating tasks. You will learn how to create a cron job that runs every day at 5 am UTC by creating a Vercel Function and configuring it in your vercel.json file.

Prerequisites

  1. Create a function

    This function contains the code that will be executed by the cron job. This example uses a simple function that returns the user's region.

    app/api/hello/route.ts
    export function GET(request: Request) {
  return new Response('Hello from Vercel!');
}
    Open in v0

  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/hello",
      "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/hello path every day at 5:00 am UTC.

Next steps

Now that you have created a cron job, you can learn more about how to manage and configure them:

Last updated on March 14, 2025
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