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heroku-alarm-clock

:clock9: cron node app to prevent heroku apps from sleeping.

How it works?

Simple: any X minutes a cron job will ping all the url's (heroku apps) you have configured. The job will also be schedule to be executed any hour/s you want. Notice that free heroku apps should be asleep at least 6 hours per day.

Pre Requisites

  1. nodejs
  2. redis.

I am using the free online subscription of redislab

Install

  1. Clone or download the repo.
  2. Open a terminal and locate the repo directory.
  3. Run: $ npm i

Set Up

You need to run the application with these environment variables:

  1. PING_MINUTES -> integer value from 1 to 59
  2. PING_HOURS -> list of all hours separated with ','
  3. PING_URLS -> list of all heroku apps url's separated with ','
  4. REDIS_URL -> redis db connection string
```

PING_MINUTES=30
PING_HOURS=6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23
PING_URLS=http://my-domain.com,http://my-domain2.com
REDIS_URL=redis://redisHost.com:17411
```

The app is using dotenv nodejs module to emulate environment variables. You can create a .env file at the root of the repo and put all the settings there (check the sample.env demo file).

Runt It

  1. Open a terminal and locate the repo directory.
  2. Run:
  $ PING_MINUTES='30' PING_HOURS='6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23' PING_URLS='http://my-domain.com;http://my-domain2.com' REDIS_URL='redis://redisHost.com:17411' node server

Run using .env file

  1. Open a terminal and locate the repo directory.
  2. Run: $ node server

Deploy to Heroku

Deploy