Citrine

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Citrine is a library for running scheduled jobs on an Erlang cluster, similar to cron. Citrine was created to satisfy a few simple requirements:

• Provide reliable execution of jobs according to a schedule
• Keep jobs running in the event of network splits or other failure scenarios
• Build upon Elixir and Erlang primitives with minimum external dependencies
• Be easy to operate and reason about
• Work well in stateless container-based environments such as Kubernetes
• Distribute jobs globally across a cluster
• Follow a pattern of convention over configuration and minimize the number of knobs required

Internally Citrine uses Erlang's excellent mnesia module for state and process management. It uses in-memory tables, which comes with certain caveats.

If you're using mnesia elsewhere in your application, you should be aware that Citrine will attempt to join existing mnesia clusters.

What Citrine can and cannot do

Citrine is not a perfect solution for all scheduling needs. There are certain features Citrine does not implement, or even try to implement, and if you require these features you should either look elsewhere or consider different patterns.

• Best effort: There are some scenarios in which Citrine could potentially miss execution of a job, such as while rolling an update. Citrine will always try its best to execute jobs according to their schedules, but in some cases it may not.
• Exactly once semantics: Citrine does not attempt to guarantee a job runs exactly once according to its schedule, it prefers to run a job multiple times in the event of failure scenarios such as netsplits.
• Interruption handling: In the event a job is interrupted during execution, or the job itself fails, Citrine makes no attempt to restart or re-run the job.
• Idempotency: This is not so much a limitation but rather a warning: your jobs should be designed to be idempotent to prevent strange side effects. Citrine cannot provide any guarantees.
• Clustering: Citrine assumes you've already specified the cluster topology, either manually or using a library such as libcluster.

If you need stronger guarantees of execution, it's recommended that you use a combination of a stateful queueing service with a worker library, such as Exq.

If you're okay with the limitations of the library, Citrine is a great choice thanks to its simple interface, minimal dependencies and ease of operations.

Installation

The package can be installed by adding citrine to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:citrine, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Usage

Create a module for the core scheduler:

defmodule MyApp.Scheduler do
  use Citrine.Scheduler, otp_app: :myapp
end

Add the scheduler to your supervisor tree, for example in application.ex:

defmodule MyApp.Application do
  use Application
  def start(_type, _args) do
    children = [
      # Start your Citrine scheduler
      MyApp.Scheduler
    ]
    opts = [strategy: :one_for_one, name: MyApp.Supervisor]
    Supervisor.start_link(children, opts)
  end
end

Use the scheduler to start and stop a job:

# Create a job
job = %Citrine.Job{
  id: "my_job_id",
  schedule: "* * * * * *", # Run every second
  task: job_task,
  extended_syntax: true # Use extended cron syntax
}
# Start or update a job
MyApp.Scheduler.put_job(job)
# Terminate and delete a job
MyApp.Scheduler.delete_job(job)

For further details, see HexDocs.