Use Different Timezone for Each Cron Job

Instead of using timezone from your EasyCron account for all cron jobs, from now on you may specify different timezone for each cron job.

We've just added two options that allow you to choose if you want to use the global timezone (the timezone from your EasyCron account) or specify a particular timezone for your cron job:

Specify different timezones for each of your cron jobs

In our API, associated methods (Add and Edit) also got two additional parameters (timezone_from, timezone) that implement this new feature.

To avoid confusion, all places (logs, failures, test run page, etc.) on our site showing date and times consequently have a timezone abbreviation appended:

Times Displayed with Abbreviation Timezone Names

Allowing specifying cron job timezone individually greatly improves the usability of our service in many use scenarios. Hope that you'll like it.

EasyCron New UI Launched

We're proud to say that recently we launched an entire new UI with functionality updates.

The front end of our site is now neat and could be loaded faster.

EasyCron New Front End

The back end also got a complete rebuild. Users can now easily click into category of "enabled", "disabled" cron jobs, or a particular group of cron jobs easily from the home page's left sidebar. In the cron job list page of any category or group, you may navigate cron jobs by page, search/reorder cron jobs. These new functionality and flexibility will greatly help you find and configure your cron jobs.

EasyCron New Back End

Our whole site (including front end and back end) is mobile friendly now. We introduced all necessary responsibility technologies to make the site look and work perfectly in mobile devices (from small screen cellphone to medium screen Xpad and large screen desktop).

EasyCron New Mobile Front End

EasyCron New Mobile Back End

Stay tuned, more exciting updates are coming :)

Output regexp matching

In some cases, you may want to determine the success (or failure) of cron job execution by the content of the output responded from your cron job script (not only by the HTTP code).

With the new feature we introduced today, you can now use regexp to match the output (HTTP message body), and then judge if the cron job execution is successful.

Output regexp matching

As you can see in the screenshot, there are 3 options you could choose from as the condition for your execution to be considered as succeeded or failed:

• When the HTTP Status is 2xx, consider succeeded. (This is the default option)
• When the HTTP Status is 2xx, consider succeeded if the HTTP message body matches a specified regular expression.
• When the HTTP Status is 2xx, consider failed if the HTTP message body matches a specified regular expression.

After above 3 new options were added, the complete rules for judging success or failure are:

1. Consider failed when the HTTP Status is NOT 2xx (e.g. 200, 201, etc.).
2. When the HTTP Status is 2xx, check above 3 options.

For the sake of simplicity and matching performance, we use Google re2 as the regexp engine.

Hope that the new feature rocks for you.

Execution logs enhanced

We recently made some changes to the way we trim and save execution logs.

In the past, in additional to cron job ID, scheduled time to execute, trigger time, done time, cost time and HTTP status, up to 10 KB of output (includes HTTP headers and HTTP message body) responded from your cron job script will be saved for each execution.

Now, the log output part saved in new way will contain:

• up to 10 KB of HTTP headers, plus
• up to 20 KB (5 KB for individual plans) of head of the HTTP message body, plus
• a line of text (example: 1200 Characters Stripped) inserted by EasyCron indicating how many characters were stripped (if the whole HTTP message body is longer than the log length limit of your plan), plus
• up to 20 KB (5 KB for individual plans) of tail of the HTTP message body.

We hope that the new logs will provide more information you need and help you better understand the overall response from your cron job scripts.

Cron job execution tracking

Want to know if your cron job has been triggered or not before it's done and its log is saved? Now you're able to do it with our new feature "cron job execution tracking".

With cron job execution tracking, when your cron job has been triggered and is running, your will see an "executing" line immediately in the logs of this cron job telling you that it's executing, like screenshot below:

Cron job execution tracking

This is extremely useful for your awareness of that the cron job has been successfully fired. So that you don't need to worry about you miss the cron job trigger time.