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Comment by arkadiyt | Hacker News Reader

I will continue to rail against Fly.io for their lack of cron job support. They recently announced scheduled machines but I tried it and it simply ... didn't work. Spent several hours trying to deploy a machine and got nowhere.

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Please don't spread misinformation playing a FUD book.

Nothing stops you from using cron in your Dockerfile:

    RUN apt-get install -y cron

Actually I just did it a few weeks ago and it works as expected.

fly.io is universal, it just runs your Dockerfile. Everything else is up to you.

It's OK! This comment would be great without the first line. They're making a legit point: Heroku had some built-in cron thing, I guess? (I'm not the Heroku person on our team). We're gradually rolling one of those out. That's the comparison they're making.

It's weird, because there's a group of (understandably) devoted Heroku users who have very high standards for fidelity to Heroku's DX, and while we're thrilled to do our best to meet (or at least approach) those standards, being Heroku is actually not the primary mission of our team; getting people's apps running quickly and close to their users globally is.

Heroku was the original gold standard for git based app deploys, but never for scheduling tasks. Here's a link to the documentation of Heroku's supposed "cron alternative" : https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/scheduler

It only supports hourly, daily, or every 10 minutes and it isn't even guaranteed to run. I would see it skip jobs more often than I expected, maybe 1 in 20 at times.

Supporting actual cron is way better than anything Heroku offered.

I've wanted us to do a cron-thing for years, ever since I started, but because I hate cron. :)

I'm also a very happy user of cronjobs using `cron -f` (managed with Overmind) on one of their free shared VMs.

> I will continue to rail against Fly.io for their lack of cron job support.

Don't need to 'rail against' someone building a product that doesn't exactly fit your needs.

This is what I did with Heroku and will continue to do if I am trying out fly.io or render (1 dollar for cronjob). I know you could get free cronjob on Heroku if you provide them your credit card info.

So, here is what I did. Added a simple API layer in front of my script. The API layer takes in a secret message to a specific endpoint that initiates a background process. Initially, I used my raspberry pi to periodically make the API requests. But I plan to try out: https://cron-job.org/en/

I'd consider initiating them from free GitHub actions

Isn't GitHub actions free for only public repositories?

You get a limited number of free build minutes per account for private repositories. 2,000 minutes are included for free accounts.

I’ve been using cron-job.org this way on my own side project and it’s been working great.

I found some rough edges as well trying to deploy a rust app.

Having heard about fly.io from fasterthanlime I was expecting things to be smoother but there were a few gotchas.

Eventually I managed to configure things in the right way but it was a far cry from heroku buildpacks.

I'm trying to get my clients (1M+ spending per year) to switch from azure (absolute dumpster fire) to fly.io but I'm not sure it's mature enough just yet.

At that point I'd rather have to configure standard machines on hetzner than finding the quirks of a random paas

We are amid a similar switch from Azure to Fly.io and it is a smooth sailing so far.

The best aspects of fly.io are 1) effortless multi-regional deployments 2) technological freedom 3) price. For example: Azure = $140, Fly.io = $10 for the same deployment. We are in love with those guys and gals.

But it's not all sunshine and roses. Some fly.io users have intermittent problems during deployments (see forum). I believe those issues will be rectified and improved with time.

It’s on my list to evaluate Fly.io. I’m surprised by this.

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