Creating a Cron Job in K8S

Creating a Cron Job

Cron jobs require a config file. This example cron job config .spec file prints the current time and a hello message every minute:

application/job/cronjob.yaml

apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: hello
spec:
  schedule: "*/1 * * * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: hello
            image: busybox
            args:
            - /bin/sh
            - -c
            - date; echo Hello from the Kubernetes cluster
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

Run the example cron job by downloading the example file and then running this command:

$ kubectl create -f ./cronjob.yaml
cronjob "hello" created

Alternatively, you can use kubectl run to create a cron job without writing a full config:

$ kubectl run hello --schedule="*/1 * * * *" --restart=OnFailure --image=busybox -- /bin/sh -c "date; echo Hello from the Kubernetes cluster"
cronjob "hello" created

After creating the cron job, get its status using this command:

$ kubectl get cronjob hello
NAME      SCHEDULE      SUSPEND   ACTIVE    LAST-SCHEDULE
hello     */1 * * * *   False     0         <none>

As you can see from the results of the command, the cron job has not scheduled or run any jobs yet. Watch for the job to be created in around one minute:

$ kubectl get jobs --watch
NAME               DESIRED   SUCCESSFUL   AGE
hello-4111706356   1         1         2s

Now you’ve seen one running job scheduled by the “hello” cron job. You can stop watching the job and view the cron job again to see that it scheduled the job:

$ kubectl get cronjob hello
NAME      SCHEDULE      SUSPEND   ACTIVE    LAST-SCHEDULE
hello     */1 * * * *   False     0         Mon, 29 Aug 2016 14:34:00 -0700

You should see that the cron job “hello” successfully scheduled a job at the time specified in LAST-SCHEDULE. There are currently 0 active jobs, meaning that the job has completed or failed.

Now, find the pods that the last scheduled job created and view the standard output of one of the pods. Note that the job name and pod name are different.

# Replace "hello-4111706356" with the job name in your system
$ pods=$(kubectl get pods --selector=job-name=hello-4111706356 --output=jsonpath={.items..metadata.name})

$ echo $pods
hello-4111706356-o9qcm

$ kubectl logs $pods
Mon Aug 29 21:34:09 UTC 2016
Hello from the Kubernetes cluster

https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/job/automated-tasks-with-cron-jobs/