Note

As of February 22nd 2023 Vercel is officially offering built-in cron jobs to trigger your serverless and edge functions. Read the documentation to learn more. Keep in mind the feature is only free during its beta phase, it'll be a paid feature for general availability, which means that the GitHub Actions route will remain relevant for a completly free option.

Next.js Cron

Cron jobs with Github Actions for Next.js applications on Vercel▲

Motivation

Since the Vercel platform is event-driven, therefore not maintaining a running server, you can't really schedule calls on your API routes or Serverless functions in your Next.js application. Although there are many pre-existing services that provide scheduled cron jobs, I ultimately decided that Github Actions suits my needs the best, since it integrates nicely with any project that already lives on Github, plus it's completely free.

Get started

All Github Actions reside in the directory .github/workflows/ of your repository and are written in YAML.

.github/workflows/starter.yaml is the most basic workflow to help you get started with Actions.

Scheduled tasks

With Scheduled events you can execute tasks at specified intervals. For instance, the provided workflow .github/workflows/scheduled.yaml executes a HTTP request with curl every 60 minutes.

name: Hourly cron job
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '*/60 * * * *'
jobs:
  cron:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Hourly cron job
        run: |
          curl --request POST \
          --url 'https://example.com/api/task' \
          --header 'Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.ACTION_KEY }}'

If you are having trouble writing cron schedule expressions, take a look at crontab guru.

Next.js API routes

API routes and Serverless functions provide a straightforward solution to building your API with Next.js on Vercel. Any file inside the folder pages/api is mapped to /api/* and will be treated as an API endpoint instead of a page.

If you are using serverless functions, regardless of the Runtime, you would need to put the files into the /api/ directory at your project's root.

Authorization flow

To securely trigger API routes and serverless functions with Github Actions, you need to provide an authorization key in the header of your API call, which, when executed, gets compared to a corresponding key in your Next.js application.

You can achieve this by adding Encrypted Secrets to your Github repository and passing them with the header of your HTTP request, like shown in the previous code snippet. Along with adding the key to your Github repository, you also need to access it within your Next.js application, preferably through Environment Variables.

The example pages/api/example.js implements this authorization flow.

export default function handler(req, res) {

  const { APP_KEY } = process.env;
  const { ACTION_KEY } = req.headers.authorization.split(" ")[1];

  try {
    if (ACTION_KEY === APP_KEY) {
      // Process the POST request
      res.status(200).json({ success: 'true' })
    } else {
      res.status(401)
    }
  } catch(err) {
    res.status(500)
  }
}

Use pages/api/example.ts for Typescript.

import type { NextApiRequest, NextApiResponse } from 'next'

export default function handler(req:NextApiRequest, res:NextApiResponse) {

  const { APP_KEY } = process.env;
  const { ACTION_KEY } = req.headers.authorization.split(" ")[1];

  try {
    if (ACTION_KEY === APP_KEY) {
      // Process the POST request
      res.status(200).json({ success: 'true' })
    } else {
      res.status(401)
    }
  } catch(err) {
    res.status(500)
  }
}