Do App Engine Managed VMs Support the AppEngine Cron System?

[Christopher Eaton]

I have a nodejs based Managed VM. It works great, deploys fine, etc. However, I can find basically zero documentation about getting AppEngine's cron to work with it. Many forum/stack overflow posts allude to it being supported, but no one knows how. 

I tried dropping a cron.yaml file into my app's directory (same location as the app.yaml file) but it doesn't seem to register when deployed.

Anyone know anything about this, is it supported or not?

*Note I'm not talking about cron within the docker image, I'm specifically asking about the AppEngine cron functionality that is grouped with Task Queues in the console.

[Christopher Eaton]

Answered- Thanks folks - I want to leave this here in case someone else goes digging for an answer:

Deploying is not enough to get the cron jobs going, you have to use the appcfg.py (found in the google_appengine directory after installing the SDK) to update the cron.

Here's the exact command that pushed my cron.yaml to AppEngine:

./appcfg.py update_cron /path/to/app-root/ --no_cookies --noauth_local_webserver -A xxxx

*Where "xxx" is my cloud project id

Hope that helps anyone in the future!

[Kyle Finley]

Christopher,

I'm glad you found a solutions. I believe that you can also specify your cron.yaml when deploying. At least it works with Go. E.g.

gcloud preview app deploy app.yaml cron.yaml

And I haven't tested it, but I suspect you can add the cron directive to your app.yaml file directly, without the need for a separate file:

// app.yaml

runtime: node

// ...

cron:

- description: task one

  url: /task/one

  schedule: every 1 minutes