Execute jobs on a schedule

This page describes how to execute Cloud Run jobs on a schedule using crontab.

Required roles

To get the permissions that you need for the operations described on this page, ask your administrator to grant you one of the following IAM roles on your Cloud Run job:

  • To execute jobs using the Google Cloud CLI: Cloud Run Invoker (roles/run.invoker) on the Cloud Run job.
  • To execute jobs using the Cloud de Confiance console, to override job configurations, or to cancel job executions: Cloud Run Developer (roles/run.developer) on the Cloud Run job.

For a list of IAM roles and permissions that are associated with Cloud Run, see Cloud Run IAM roles and Cloud Run IAM permissions. If your Cloud Run job interfaces with Cloud de Confiance APIs, such as Cloud Client Libraries, see the service identity configuration guide. For more information about granting roles, see deployment permissions and manage access.

Grant the service account access to your project

If you haven't created a service account for your Cloud Run job, create a service account. For example:

gcloud iam service-accounts create SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME

Replace SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME with the name of your service account, for example, job-scheduler.

To get the permissions that your service account needs to execute jobs, ask your administrator to grant your service account the Jobs Executor (roles/run.jobsExecutor) role on your project. For example:

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT_ID \
    --member=serviceAccount:job-scheduler@PROJECT_ID.s3ns.iam.gserviceaccount.com \
    --role roles/run.jobsExecutor

Replace PROJECT_ID with the name of your project ID.

Before you begin

Create a Cloud Run job if you have not created one yet.

Configure a Cloud Run job to execute on a schedule

To execute a Cloud Run job on a schedule:

  1. Create a new directory named cloud-run-jobs-sched and change directory into it:

    mkdir cloud-run-jobs-sched
cd cloud-run-jobs-sched

  2. Create a Dockerfile file and paste the following lines into it:

    FROM gcr.io/google.com/cloudsdktool/google-cloud-cli:536.0.1

RUN apt-get update -y && \
apt-get install -y python3-dev python3-pip python3-venv && \
apt-get install -y cron

ENV APP_HOME /app
WORKDIR $APP_HOME
COPY . ./

ENV VIRTUAL_ENV=/opt/venv
RUN python3 -m venv $VIRTUAL_ENV
ENV PATH="$VIRTUAL_ENV/bin:$PATH"

RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

# Set up the cron schedule.
RUN crontab /app/cron

CMD /app/entrypoint.sh

  3. Create a entrypoint.sh file and paste the following lines into it:

    gcloud config set project $PROJECT
gcloud config set run/region $REGION

cron

gunicorn --bind :$PORT --workers 1 --threads 8 --timeout 0 main:app

  4. Create a main.py file and paste the following Python code into it:

    import os

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")
def hello_world():
    return "Hello World!"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(debug=True, host="0.0.0.0", port=int(os.environ.get("PORT", 8080)))

  5. Create a requirements.txt file and paste the following dependencies into it:

    Flask==3.0.3
gunicorn==23.0.0
Werkzeug==3.0.3

  6. Create a cron file in your directory and add a cron schedule to execute the job. For example:

    0 2 * * * gcloud run jobs execute --async test-job > /proc/1/fd/1 2>&1

    This command executes a job called test-job every day at 2am. Any errors starting the job execution will be shown in the service's logs.

    To create multiple schedules for multiple jobs, update the cron file with any jobs that you'd like to execute, along with their associated schedule. For example:

    ${cron_schedule} gcloud run jobs execute --async ${job_1} > /proc/1/fd/1 2>&1
${cron_schedule} gcloud run jobs execute --async ${job_2} > /proc/1/fd/1 2>&1
...

  7. Deploy the job scheduler service:

    gcloud run deploy JOB_NAME \
    --source . \
    --region REGION \
    --set-env-vars PROJECT=PROJECT_ID,REGION=REGION \
    --service-account SERVICE_ACCOUNT \
    --no-allow-unauthenticated \
    --min-instances=1 \
    --no-cpu-throttling

    Replace the following:

    • JOB-NAME: the name of your Cloud Run job.
    • PROJECT_ID: your project ID.
    • REGION: the region for your Cloud Run job, for example, europe-west1.

What's next

After you use this feature, you can do the following: