Which all libraries for NodeJS provide persistent scheduling and cron jobs - node.js

From what I have read, only Agenda,Node-crontab and schedule-drone provide this feature. It would be grateful if you provide a small description of the mechanism which these library use for persistent storage of jobs.
I need to send emails by reading the mail options from MongoDB and want my nodeJS application to somehow schedule and be in sych with these even if nodeJS is stopped temporarily.

For MySQL you can try with nodejs-persistable-scheduler
In other cases you need to build your own solution. For example, I created a collection/table to store the schedule state and rules. Then, if the service's crashes or restarted, I can get all the schedules form the database and restart them again from the app.listen event.

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How to poll another server from Node.js?

I'm currently developing a Shopify app with Node/Express and a Postgres database. When a user registers an account and connects their Shopify store, I'll need to download all of their store's orders. They could have 100,000s of orders, so I'd like to use a Shopify GraphQL Bulk Operation. While Shopify is handling this, my Node server will need to poll the Shopify server to check on the progress, and when the operation is complete, Shopify will send me a link where I can download all of the data. Once the data is processed and stored in my database, I'll send the user an email to say that their account is now set up.
How should I handle polling the Shopify server? The process could take anywhere from a few mins to hours. Using setInterval() would be a bad idea right? Because if the server restarts for whatever reason, It will lose the interval? So, should I use some sort of background task? And would I need to store anything in my database? I've researched cron jobs, child processes, worker threads, the bull package -- and it's left me a little confused.
(I also know that I could use a webhook, but Shopify offers no guarantees that my app will receive the webhook.)
Upon installation, launch a background job labeled "GetCustomerOrders". As you know, background jobs are mature, and nicely handle problems. For example, they can retry themselves if something goes wrong.
The Background job itself just sets up the Bulk Download and then settles into Poll. Polling is no big deal and just happens. As you said, could be minutes, could take hours. Nevertheless, a poll gets status on a bulk download, and that can even be hot-rodded. For example, you poll with an ID. So you poll till that ID completes. Regardless of restarts.
At the end of that rather simple setup, you get an URL to download and parse JSON. Spawn another job even for that. Endless fun. Why sweat it? Background jobs are the way to go.
The Webhook idea is OK but as the documentation says, they are not 100% and CRON is bush-league in that it misses out on the mature development of jobs in queues and is more like a simple trigger. Relying on CRON to start something is fine, but gives you zero management over what it starts.
I am guessing NodeJS has a decent background job system by this time. When you look at Sidekiq for Ruby you realize what awesome is. Surely you can find a copycat in Node that comes close anyway.

How to send a message to ReactPHP/Amp/Swoole/etc. from PHP-FPM?

I'm thinking about making a worker script to handle async tasks on my server, using a framework such as ReactPHP, Amp or Swoole that would be running permanently as a service (I haven't made my choice between these frameworks yet, so solutions involving any of these are helpful).
My web endpoints would still be managed by Apache + PHP-FPM as normal, and I want them to be able to send messages to the permanently running script to make it aware that an async job is ready to be processed ASAP.
Pseudo-code from a web endpoint:
$pdo->exec('INSERT INTO Jobs VALUES (...)');
$jobId = $pdo->lastInsertId();
notify_new_job_to_worker($jobId); // how?
How do you typically handle communication from PHP-FPM to the permanently running script in any of these frameworks? Do you set up a TCP / Unix Socket server and implement your own messaging protocol, or are there ready-made solutions to tackle this problem?
Note: In case you're wondering, I'm not planning to use a third-party message queue software, as I want async jobs to be stored as part of the database transaction (either the whole transaction is successful, including committing the pending job, or the whole transaction is discarded). This is my guarantee that no jobs will be lost. If, worst case scenario, the message cannot be sent to the running service, missed jobs may still be retrieved from the database at a later time.
If your worker "runs permanently" as a service, it should provide some API to interact through. I use AmPHP in my project for async services, and my services implement HTTP/Websockets servers (using Amp libraries) as an API transport.
Hey ReactPHP core team member here. It totally depends on what your ReactPHP/Amp/Swoole process does. Looking at your example my suggestion would be to use a message broker/queue like RabbitMQ. That way the process can pic it up when it's ready for it and ack it when it's done. If anything happens with your process in the mean time and dies it will retry as long as it hasn't acked the message. You can also do a small HTTP API but that doesn't guarantee reprocessing of messages on fatal failures. Ultimately it all depends on your design, all 3 projects are a toolset to build your own architectures and systems, it's all up to you.

Detecting the end of an Azure Batch job

In my application I create an Azure batch job. It's a Node app and I use an azure-batch Node client, but I could also be using REST, I don't think it matters. I can't switch to a C# client, however.
I expect the job to be completed in a few seconds and I wish to pause the code until the batch job is over but I am not sure how to detect the end of the job without polling the Job Status API. Neither the Node client nor the REST API exposes such functionality. I thought I could maybe register for an event of some sort but was not able to find anything like that. There are job release tasks but I am not sure if I can achieve this using them.
Any ideas how the end of an Azure batch job can be detected from within my application?
One way to do this is once you add your tasks to the job, set the job's onAllTasksComplete property to 'terminatejob'.
Then you can poll the Job-Get API, and check the state property on the job for when the job is complete (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/batchservice/job/get#jobstate or https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/javascript/api/azure-batch/job?view=azure-node-latest#get-string--object-).

Cron job on NodeJS server runs multiple times simultaneously due to load balancers

I have cron job services on my nodeJS server (part of a React app) that I deploy using Convox to AWS, which has 4 load balancer servers. This means my cron job runs 4 times simultaneously on each server, when I only want it to run once. How can I stop this from happening and have my cron jobs run only once? As far as I know, there is no reliable way to lock my cron to a specific instance, since instances are volatile and may be deleted/recreated as needed.
The cron job services conduct tasks such as querying and updating our database, sending out emails and texts to users, and conducting external API calls. The services are run using the cron npm package, upon the server starting (after server.listen).
Can you expose these tasks via url? That way you can have an external cron service that requests each job via url against the ELB.
See https://cron-job.org/en/
Another advantage of this approach is you get error reports if a url does not return a 200 status. This could simplify error tracking across all jobs.
Also this provides better redudency and load balancing, as opposed to having a single instance where you run all jobs.
I had the same issue. Se my solution here. Two emails was sent because of two instances on AWS. I lock each sending by unique random number.
My example based on MongoDB.
https://forums.meteor.com/t/help-email-sends-emails-twice/50624

No Mongo Query gets result when cron is running in background

I have been NodeJS as server side and MongoDB as our database. It really works great together.
Now I have added node-schedule library into our system , to call a function like a cron-job.
The process takes around hours to complete.
My issue is whenever cron is running , all users to my site gets No response fro server i.e database gets locked.
Stuck on the issue from a week , needs good solution to run cron , without affecting users using the site.
Typically you will want to write a worker and run the worker in a different entry point that is not part of your server. There are multiple ways you could achieve this.
1) Write a worker on another server to interact with your database
2) Write a service worker on another server that interacts with your api
3) Use the same server but setup a cronjob to execute the file that does the work at a specified time.
But you should not do this from the same entry point that your server is running on. You need a different execution file.
There is one thing you can do to run this where it will not bog down your server and that would be for your trigger for node-schedule to run a child process. https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html

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