As I was still learning my way around the MEAN stack, I couldn’t wrap my mind around how to schedule future tasks in the MEAN stack (such as sending an email). This was because MEAN is so stateless, transactional. Or at least it seems to be. But, recall that we have ExpressJS and Node.js in the picture, which are always running on the server side.
Given this, the solution turns out to be very simple. You can schedule tasks in Node using the node-schedule package. To install node-schedule, run the command:
npm install node-schedule
Then in ExpressJS you can set up tasks like so:
var schedule = require("node-schedule");
var dailyRule = new schedule.RecurrenceRule();
dailyRule.second = 0;
dailyRule.minute = 0;
dailyRule.hour = 0;
var onceADay = schedule.scheduleJob(dailyRule, function(){
//Do something here
});
I’ve found that it’s easy to put this in ExpressJS’s app.js (or wherever your server startup script is), since that is called on the MEAN application’s server side startup.