# Cron Jobs

Applications can define cron jobs to run recurring tasks at scheduled times

Cron jobs are an important piece of building applications that need work done on a recurring schedule.

Hatchbox configures cron jobs to use

## Debugging cron jobs

Cron is a long-running process built-in to the OS. You can view the cron logs to see what times it executes the cron job commands.

To view the cron logs:

```
journalctl -u cron
```

To follow live cron logs:

```
journalctl -u cron -f
```

To filter to the deploy user's cron jobs:

```
journalctl -u cron -g "\(deploy\) CMD"
```

Cron doesn't capture the output of commands it executes, so you may want to write the job's output to a file. You can update your cron job to append logs to a file and use `2>&1` to capture both stdout and stderr:

```
my-command >> /home/deploy/cron.log 2>&1
```