Changelog

Every branch can now run cron jobs. A cron job sends one HTTP request on a schedule, either to a compute service in your project or to any external URL. You don't need a worker process or an always-on machine to keep the clock running.

Create a job

Expressions use standard 5-field cron syntax and always run in UTC. This one calls /tasks/nightly on the api service at 03:00 UTC every day:

insta cron preview '0 3 * * *'
insta cron create nightly-report '0 3 * * *' --service api --path /tasks/nightly

preview validates the expression and prints the next five fire times, using the same parser the scheduler does. To call something outside InstaCloud, pass --url https://… instead of --service. --method POST, --body and --header name=value shape the request. Header values are encrypted at rest and never shown again: insta cron show lists header names only.

In the dashboard, Cron Job is an entry in Add Service. Each job appears as a card on the services canvas, with an edge to the service it calls. Edits go through Deploy like every other change on the branch. Pause and Run now take effect immediately.

What happens when it fires

A job that targets a service names the service, not a URL, so a redeploy or a region move can't leave it calling a dead host. If the service is idle, it is woken first, and the time spent waking doesn't count against the request timeout. If the previous run is still going when the next tick arrives, that tick is skipped. The same happens if the platform is more than five minutes late for a tick, rather than delivering it long after it was due.

insta cron runs <name> shows each run's status, attempts, HTTP status, and how long the wake and the request each took. A slow wake is on us; a slow request is your endpoint. pause, resume, run and delete do what they say, and a deleted job stops firing immediately.

Cron needs CLI 0.1.3 or newer. Free organizations can keep 5 jobs, Pro 100, and Team and Enterprise 1,000.