Scheduled publication

This guide will explain how to create an article schedule system.

Introduction

This guide will use this draft system guide. You should review it first to understand the draft/published status and the Article API that we will use in this guide.

What we want here is to be able to set a publication date for an article, and at this date, switch the draft status to published.

Example

For this example, we will have to add a publish_at attribute to the Article Content Type.

• Click on the Content Type Builder link in the left menu
• Select the Article Content Type
• Add another field
  • date attribute named publish_at with datetime type

And add some data with different dates and status to be able to see the publication happen. Make sure to create some entries with a draft status and a published_at that is before the current date.

The goal will be to check every minute if there is draft articles that have a publish_at lower that the current date.

Create a CRON task

To execute a function every minutes, we will use a CRON task.

Here is the full documentation of this feature.

Path — ./config/functions/cron.js

module.exports = {
  '*/1 * * * *': () => {
    console.log('1 minute later');
  },
};

Make sure the enabled cron config is set to true in ./config/environments/**/server.json file.

TIP

Please note that Strapi's built in CRON feature will not work if you plan to use pm2 or node based clustering. You will need to execute these CRON tasks outside of Strapi.

Business logic

Now we can start writting the publishing logic. The code that will fetch all draft Articles with a published_at that is before the current date.

Then we will update the status of all these articles to published.

Path — ./config/functions/cron.js

module.exports = {
  '*/1 * * * *': async () => {
    // fetch articles to publish
    const draftArticleToPublish = await strapi.api.article.services.article.find({
      status: 'draft',
      publish_at_lt: new Date(),
    });

    // update status of articles
    draftArticleToPublish.forEach(async article => {
      await strapi.api.article.services.article.update({ id: article.id }, { status: 'published' });
    });
  },
};

And tada!