Multiple Users support is added

You may now add multiple users to your EasyCron account if you're under an Enterprise plan (either paid or trial). The additional users are called subusers.

As an admin to your EasyCron account, you can click on the "subusers" link in the top menu to access the subuser list. There you may add/edit/delete subusers in your account.

Access Subusers Page

By clicking the "Add Subuser" button on the subusers page, you may enter an email address to create a subuser, then an email with a generated password will be sent to the email address.

"Add Subuser" Button

Enter an Email Address to Create a Subuser

After receiving the email, the subuser can login with the email address and the password. Once logs in, he or she can update the login credential (email address and password) at the user settings page.

A subuser can only add/edit/delete/view cron jobs and groups currently. Payment method, orders, billing and affiliate information, and API are not accessible nor editable by subusers.

The timezone of the account can be viewed but can not be changed by a subuser. It will help assure the consistency of the timezone in which the cron job's execution times are calculated and avoid any confusion.

If you have any advice on the new feature, please contact us. Thanks.

Added "year" field support in cron expression

We're exited to announce that EasyCron supports "year" field in cron expression now. By appending a year field to the end of your cron expression, EasyCron will only run your cron job during the specified year(s).

In the year field, you could use values "1970" to "2099" with special characters ", - * /".

For more information about "year" field details, please refer to our cron expression guide.

Beside using cron expression directly, you could also specify execution year(s) by choosing years manually in our cron job creating/editing UI too as the screenshot below.

Choose Execution Years Manually for Cron Job

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.

Custom cron job timeout

Today we added a new feature to EasyCron - customizing cron job timeout.

In our previous cron job executing program, we always used your plan's default timeout as timeout limit. But in a few situations, you may want to change the timeout setting.

For example, if you don't want your cron job to run overlappingly, instead of setting max execution time in your script, you could also set the timeout limit at EasyCron. Once the configured timeout is reached, EasyCron will disconnect the connection between itself and your server, and your cron job script could detect the client side abortion and terminate the execution, so next execution could come without conflicting with previous execution(s).

Another possible use case for custom timeout is, if you know the legitimate maximum execution time of your cron job script/program, you may want to restrict the execution to a specific duration, so that any unexpected long time execution will be cancelled then.

Other uses include but not limit to, if you're going to use EasyCron as a monitoring service, you could set a deadline to the max response time cost; preventing proxy timeout, etc..

Custom cron job timeout

We hope that you could find this new feature useful.

Email notification optimization

As too many emails sending out from EasyCron has resulted in some problems, we has reduced the amount of email notices by changing the email notice triggering mechanism.

The main problems caused by frequently emailing are:

1) Many email service providers deem us as SPAM sender, block our emails (or/and IPs) constantly. This has brought big trouble to EasyCron and our users. For example, many expired users could not receive expiry email notices and didn't renew their accounts on time; some crucial cron jobs failed but didn't receive attention, and so on.

2) Some users' email box were filled up by emails sent by us.

3) The credit and authority of our domain and IPs descends as black listing done by other parties.

4) Our email server keeps being hit by huge amount of bounced emails from recipients.

Now EasyCron sends out email notices only when:

1) starts failing, or

2) returns to success from failure.

That is to say, if your cron job fails consecutively for more than one time, only one failure email notice will be sent to you.

You could also specify a "sensitivity" setting to configure only after how many consecutive failures that the failure notice will get sent.

Email notification and failure threshold

If in some cases, you really need to be notified for each failure or execution of your cron job, you could utilize the "webhook" feature.

Placeholders you could use in cron job URL

EasyCron added placeholder support in cron job URL today.

You could use placeholders:
__RANDOM__
__TIMESTAMP__
in your cron job URL.

__RANDOM__ will be replaced with a random 12-digit integer when your cron job is fired.
And __TIMESTAMP__ will be replaced with unix timestamp.

For example, URL
http://www.example.com?__RANDOM__
could finally be http://www.example.com?123456789000 when it's fired.

Random integer or timestamp in URL will prevent EasyCron's requests from hitting cache in your proxy or server.

EasyCron now supports sending webhook requests after cron job executions

Making a webhook request after cron job execution could be useful for notification or chaining other actions together after a cron job script/program does its work.

From now on, EasyCron starts supporting webhook request after cron job execution. Along the request, users can choose to send all or some of the following fields:

• Cron Job ID (will be received in your webhook script as parameter "cron_job_id")
• Cron Job Name (as parameter "cron_job_name")
• Cron Job URL (as parameter "cron_job_url")
• Cron Job Execution Status (as parameter "cron_job_execution_status". "Success" or "Failure")
• Cron Job Execution Error (as parameter "cron_job_execution_error". Will be empty when execution succeeds)

Configure webhook request after executions of your cron job

You could also choose a HTTP method to make the request from GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, CONNECT, OPTIONS and TRACE.

As everybody knows, email and maybe a few other contact methods (SMS, Push message, etc.) are not very dependable ways for notification. By using the webhook mechanism, users can do a more reliable notification in their webhook target script (Even sending emails to themselves from their own email address has higher arrival rate). And more than this, users can actually do almost anything in the webhook script. This could greatly extend the post-execution functionality of EasyCron.

Welcome to share how the webhook feature help you and simplify your work in the comments.

Customize your HTTP method and headers for your cron job requests

Happy New Year!

EasyCron used to have a "posts" and "cookies" field in the cron job settings which are for posting content and setting cookies for the HTTP requests sent to your server.

Now, in order to follow the HTTP standards and conventions, we've added a new feature - HTTP method and header customization - to our cron job setting.

As a result, the previous existing "posts" field is integrated with POST, PUT and PATCH method. And the previous existing "cookies" field will retire at 6:00 AM UTC, on Jan 14, 2017.

From now on, you can simply customize the HTTP method (from GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, CONNECT, OPTIONS and TRACE) and headers for your cron job requests at:

Customize HTTP method and headers for your cron job requests

If you have any longing feature that you want to have in EasyCron, please send us a message at our message page. We will always listen to our users at the first place.

Invoice system launched

In order to help our users easily get an invoice after payment, we developed an invoice system and launched it today.

Anyone can enter their payee information at billing address page and down a PDF invoice from subscriptions page (clicking "View/Down" link of related subscription first, then click "Download" link of specific payment).

Got suggestion for the invoice system? Just send it to us!

EasyCron Affiliate Program Launched

Today we proudly launched EasyCron Affiliate Program.

Earn up to $9.99 or more by referring a paid user! Join our Affiliate Program now!

Steps:

• Register as EasyCron user
• On On affiliate page, click on "Add affiliate page" to add an affiliate page (A webpage that you want to place our link on).
• We approve the affiliate page.
• You place our link on your affiliate page.
• Start earning commissions.

Any suggestion, drop us a line.

Updates to cron job UI and API

We allow users using three ways to specify cron jobs' execution time from now on:

New UI to configure cron job

As you can see in above screenshot (highlighted in green), you can specify when to execute your cron jobs:

• By time interval

  You may set cron job's execution time interval easily by choosing an option:
  
  
  Set up cron job by execution interval
  EasyCron will generate a Cron expression for your cron job. The final execution date and time of your cron job will meet your interval setting, with a random starting time. For example, for a cron job run every 10 minutes, the final Cron expression we generated could be 0/10 * * * *, or 6/10 * * * *, the latter means, the cron job starts running at "06" minute, and then be triggered every 10 minutes.
  

• By entering a Cron expression directly

  We support standard Cron expression that used in several mainstream Cron implements (Cronie, Vixie cron and Quartz java scheduler, etc.). If you already have Cron expressions for your cron jobs, or you're adept at writing them, this could be a convenient yet powerful way to specify execution time of your cron jobs.
  Besides general specicial characters, EasyCron also supports "R" character in cron expression. "R" is defined by EasyCron for specifying random execution time of cron jobs. To see details of its usage, you may check our Random Cron Job section.
  

• Choose manually

  
  Choose execution times and dates of cron job
  This is a intuitional way to configure dates and times to run your cron jobs. No matter you're a novice or an expert, you'll find the interface helpful. It supports all special chars including "R".
  

We also updated our API to adapt the cron expression improvement:

• Parameter changes:

  Simplifying parameters of queries, using only one paramter (cron_expression) to indicate the run time of a cron job instead of 5 (minute, hour, day, month, weekday).
  

• Error message changes:

  Changed some error messages.
  

For more details, please checkout our API document page.
Hope that anyone will enjoy the extremely easier process of managing cron jobs. If you have any suggestion, feel free to leave a message at our contact page.

One-click Sign up and Sign in to Manage Cron Jobs

We recently added a feature to EasyCron that will greatly simplify users' signing up and signing in process on our system.

From now on, new users can sign up with just one click (and confirmation) to use EasyCron.

Advantages:

• No user details need to be entered,
• no typos will occur,
• no activation Email checking,
• no Email delivery failure.

All you need to have is your browser has connected with Facebook or Google. We will retrieve your Email address (we just need your Email address, no other sensitive information will be retrieved) safely and generated a user account for you. At the same timie the login information of this generated account will be sent to your Email address in case you want to login in a general way.

Users registered by this mean can log in with one lick. So you don't have to worry about forgetting username or password anymore.

you're one click away from our powerful online cron job service. Sound good, right? ;)

New Version EasyCron.com Rolled out

Today we proudly rolled out a new version of EasyCron. It's a big update to many components of the system, including:

• New Design

  We replaced the old design with a fresh and inspiring new design. The change covers every pages and elements of the system. We believe you will be pleased with it.

• More AJAX

  We utilize more AJAX in cron job management process. You will notice that cron job management (enabling, disabling cron job, etc) is much easier than before.

• Bulk Actions

  Bulk Actions were requested by our users for many times. I need to say sorry about keeping them waiting, but we want to think over it thoroughly before building it :) Now it's done. I think the bulk action list shown below have covered most of the frequently used actions. If there is action we missed, let me know.

  
  Handle multiple cron jobs quickly

• Better Notices

  Some users may find that JS alerts are not that user-friendly, especially when these alerts are popped up with browser's "preventing these messages to show again" confirmation. We also see that. So we use light boxes and AJAX in-page notices in some cases this time.

• Responsive Design

  We attempt to pull-in responsive design to facilitate mobile users' using. Considering more and more users are connecting to EasyCron via cellphone, responsive design is a must. The responsive design is not implement on all elements throughout the site, if you have any advice, contact us.

• Google Custom Search Integration

  From now on, users can search our site conveniently via a Google custom search box added on the navigation bar. The search engine can search all public pages of EasyCron including FAQs, ToS, general pages, etc.. We hope it will save your time on searching information on our site.

• Page Row Settings

  For user who has huge number of cron jobs, we add a helpful feature to achieve better cron job navigation. This new feature is allowing user to custom the row number that each page of cron jobs has.

That's all. If you have any suggestion, send us a message.

Thanks for reading!

EasyCron.com Team

Cron Job Run Time Predictions

Hi everyone,

We recently released a new feature in our application: Predicting cron jobs' run times.

As you can see in our example page, once your added a cron job and enable the "Logs and Predictions", you will see latest logs in the past and run time predictions in the nearest future for the cron job (Log and prediction number depend on the plan quota. You can also configure them in the cron job "Logs and Predictions" panel).

We believe that by seeing when will your cron job run, you will be more sure how to set the cron job correctly.

Just play it around and let us know your suggestion if you have any.

User account can be safely cancelled from user panel.

From now on, users who don't need our cron job service anymore can safely cancel their accounts on user panel: http://www.easycron.com/user/edit.

After cancellation, your account information/data will be permanently cleared from our system, and the action is irreversible. So please do it with caution.

You're welcome to tell us why you're going away via our feedback form though.

Cron Job API Launched

Just now, EasyCron proudly launched Cron Job API to the public.

This API allows members of EasyCron easily integrate our services into their applications.

Currently it has following methods:

• list
• add
• edit
• enable
• disable
• delete
• logs
• timezone

For more information, please check the API Document Page.
Enjoy it!