Cron and Scheduling

GiftWrapt has a handful of scheduled jobs that handle reveal-after-event, outbound email, retention cleanup, and the background queues. They’re all HTTP endpoints under /api/cron/*, gated by a bearer token, and meant to be poked by an external scheduler.

The Endpoints

Endpoint	Suggested schedule	What it does
/api/cron/auto-archive	0 6 * * *	Archives claimed items past the birthday / Christmas / holiday reveal date. This is what triggers the recipient-facing reveal. Skips lists with an active per-list extension and reveals any whose extension has elapsed.
/api/cron/birthday-emails	0 7 * * *	Day-of birthday greetings, post-birthday gifter summaries, pre-event reminders, relationship reminders, and the orphan-claim cleanup passes.
/api/cron/cleanup-verification	0 3 * * *	Deletes expired better-auth verification rows; sweeps cron-run retention rows.
/api/cron/intelligence-recommendations	0 4 * * *	Runs the per-user analyzer pipeline; persists recommendations + run rows.
/api/cron/item-scrape-queue	0 5 * * *	Drains pending item_scrape_jobs rows from bulk-import.

All five are daily in the default schedule, deliberately staggered so they don’t pile up at the same minute.

Schedules Are Documented Defaults, Not Hard Caps

The runners themselves are idempotent and safe to run more frequently. Self-hosters can crank cadence up if they want faster turnaround on the scrape queue or Intelligence; the suggested schedules just match the daily cadence shipped in vercel.json.

The Cron Secret

All /api/cron/* endpoints check an Authorization: Bearer <secret> header against the CRON_SECRET env var. If the env var is unset, the handlers fail closed with HTTP 503 - they don’t accidentally run publicly.

• Self-host: required. The bundled cron sidecar fatals at startup if CRON_SECRET is unset, so the stack boot-loops until you set this.
• Render: render.yaml generates the value for you and attaches it to both the web service and the cron jobs.
• Vercel: vercel.json declares the schedules but not the secret. Set CRON_SECRET yourself in the project’s environment variables.
• Railway: set it yourself. railway.json carries only build and healthcheck config, and Railway’s cron is wired up through the dashboard.

Generate one with:

openssl rand -base64 48 | tr -d '/+=' | head -c 48

Skip States and Idempotency

Cron handlers return JSON describing what they did. Every run is also persisted as a row in cron_runs (start, finish, status, duration, structured summary jsonb, plus error / skipReason) so operators can answer “did the scheduler actually fire today?” without SSHing into a host or wiring an external observability stack.

Common skip states:

skipReason	When
disabled	Feature flag off in app_settings (e.g. Intelligence disabled).
no-provider	AI / email / storage config missing.
not-due	Date math says today isn’t the right day (e.g. auto-archive for a list whose birthday is in 200 days).
lock-held	Intelligence: another run is in flight for this user.
cooldown	Intelligence, manual refresh only: the user hit intelligenceManualRefreshCooldownMinutes.

Intelligence also skips work below the run level: an analyzer whose candidate slice hashes the same as the last real generation returns before its model call and carries its existing recs forward. That’s a per-analyzer economy, not a run skip, so the run still records as a success. See Intelligence.

Deployment Shapes

Vercel

Schedules live in vercel.json and run via Vercel Cron. The CRON_SECRET is set automatically by the deploy config. Don’t override anything unless you’re moving the schedule.

Render

render.yaml defines the schedules and provisions CRON_SECRET as a generated secret. The cron jobs run as separate Render Cron services hitting the deployed web service URL.

Railway

railway.json carries build and healthcheck config only - no schedules. Either wire up Railway’s cron through the dashboard (one cron service per endpoint), or run an external scheduler.

Self-Host (Docker Compose)

The bundled compose files include a cron sidecar - a tiny container that runs system crond and curls the endpoints on the schedules above. It reads CRON_SECRET from the same .env as the app and fatals at boot if the secret is unset.

You can disable the sidecar and run your own scheduler if you prefer; just hit the URLs with the bearer header.

External Scheduler

Any scheduler that can fire an HTTP request with a bearer header works:

curl -fsSL -H "Authorization: Bearer $CRON_SECRET" \
  https://giftwrapt.example.com/api/cron/auto-archive

Cron-job.org, GitHub Actions schedules, EasyCron, AWS EventBridge, plain crontab - all fine.

Admin > Scheduling

The admin scheduling page shows every endpoint, its documented schedule, the next-fire time computed from the cron expression, and the recent history pulled from cron_runs. Use it to:

• Confirm cron is actually firing.
• Inspect the structured summary jsonb for each run.
• Look at failures and their error payloads.
• See how long each run took.

The page doesn’t control the scheduler - it just reads what the scheduler-of-record (Vercel, your sidecar, etc.) actually did. If a job hasn’t fired and the admin page agrees, the issue is in the scheduler, not GiftWrapt.

Orphan-Claim Cleanup

The /api/cron/birthday-emails tick also runs two passes for the orphaned-claim flow:

• Reminder pass - day-before email to giftgivers (and partners) with un-acked orphans whose parent list’s event date is exactly one day from today. For wishlists - which have no event date - the reminder fires 13 days after the recipient deleted the item. Idempotent via giftedItems.orphanReminderSentAt. Email-gated like the rest of birthday-emails.
• Cleanup pass - hard-deletes every claim on the pending-deletion item plus the item row itself, on the parent list’s event date (or 14 days after deletion for wishlists). Runs regardless of email configuration - this is a data lifecycle operation, not a notification.

Both passes operate on pending-deletion items regardless of lists.isActive, so an archived parent list doesn’t strand orphans in limbo.

Retention

cron_runs rows are pruned by the daily verification-cleanup tick. The retention window is cronRunsRetentionDays (default 90), tunable in admin settings. Set to 0 to disable retention sweeps (rows accumulate forever).