Cron jobs not running (in dev)

Question

I've specified a cron job (to test in development) but it doesn't seem to be running. How does one make sure the jobs will work in production?

cron.yaml:

cron:
- description: cron test gathering
  url: /test/cron
  schedule: every 2 minutes from 09:00 to 23:00

app.yaml:

application: cron_test
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1

handlers:
- url: /.*
  script: main.py

main.py:

url_map = [ ('/test/cron', test.CronHandler),
            ('/error', err.Err404Handler)]

application = webapp.WSGIApplication(url_map, debug=False)

def main():
    wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

FeedCron is defined as:

class CronHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):

    def get(self):      
        logging.info("NOTE: CronHandler get request");
        return None

I was expecting to see the line, "NOTE: CronHandler get request", in the app engine's logs. I'm using the GoogleAppEngineLauncher app (version: 1.5.3.1187) to start & stop the app.

Answer 1

Three years later things have improved.

First, the route to Cron Jobs is: http://localhost:8000/cron

The development server (still) doesn't automatically run your cron jobs. However, using the link above you can do two things:

1. Click the "Run now" button, which actually triggers the URL (hurray!)
2. See the schedule, which should assure you of when the jobs would be run in production

Answer 2

I was looking for a way to simulate cron jobs on the local dev server. As a temporary solution, I am running locally a python script which access the cron url and trigger the schedule task.

import urllib2
import time
while True:
    print urllib2.urlopen("http://localhost:9080/cron/jobs/")
    time.sleep(60)

In my case the url is http://localhost:9080/cron/jobs/ and I run it every minute. Hope it can help.

Answer 3

D'Oh! Just saw the fine print in the SDK documentation:

When using the Python SDK, the dev_appserver has an admin interface that allows you to view cron jobs at /_ah/admin/cron.

The development server doesn't automatically run your cron jobs. You can use your local desktop's cron or scheduled tasks interface to trigger the URLs of your jobs with curl or a similar tool.

Answer 4

Well, my UI & backend codebase were decoupled. So I whipped up some ajax code on the UI to regularly hit the backend cron endpoints. That simulated the cron jobs for me in the local dev environment.