Hey there! We've found the following might help you get unblocked faster:

• 📚 Cron Jobs

• 📚 Running a Scheduled Job

• 🧵 Cron jobs not running!!!

If you find the answer from one of these, please let us know by solving the thread!

The cron jobs configuration allows you to run any service on schedule, so your whole service basically should be something that performs a one-off operation. When you have Cron Schedule set on the Settings the Railway (as to my understanding) will start the service accordingly to the schedule.

The expectation here is that your service starts, does it job and then exits (compared to regular services that intended to be started and keep running). When Railway starts your service on a schedule it will execute the Startup command as set on the settings of the service (or use default one, i.e. from config or a Docker image)

What exactly the service does, and what's the start command/start script - is up to you. The simplest example could look like:

Say, you have a NodeJS script that you'd like to execute on a schedule. You can go and create a custom Docker image in your repository that's based on the Node official image https://hub.docker.com/_/node but also bundles your script, i.e.

# Use official Node.js image (change version if needed)
FROM node:20-alpine

# Set working directory
WORKDIR /usr/src/app

# Copy package.json if you have dependencies
COPY package*.json ./

# Install dependencies (skip if script has none)
RUN npm install || true

# Copy your script into container
COPY script.js .

# Run script by default
CMD ["node", "script.js"]

And your complete repo structure may look like this:

my-task-repo/
├── Dockerfile
├── package.json      
├── package-lock.json
└── script.js

And the script.js is a dummy idle "task" like this:

function sleep(ms) {
  return new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
}

async function task() {
  console.log('Starting task...');

  // Sleep for 10 seconds, on real script you can do some useful work here
  await sleep(10000);

  console.log('The task has been completed!');
}

task();

Adding this repo as a service to your project should build the app using default Nixpacks just fine. Configuring the cron schedule on this service of, say, 0 0 * * * will make it to start, run the script.js and exit after 10 seconds on every midnight every day

This is what's the idea behind this on Railway to my understanding

Ok, so it's not like Vercel. Where you can have a folder crons inside a project ?

I have to create a separate project for my crons, right ?

For one off scripts that do some stuff it looks like people have done separate projects yes.

At least thats what i see from my initial search

Up to your needs, I imagine it should be completely ok to just have a separate one-off service or set of services within the main app project depending on your project architecture

https://docs.railway.com/reference/cron-jobs

official railway docs for cronjobs