[Feature request] Add support for start delay

[samiy803]

Please add support to start tasks after some delay. Currently, the only options for starting tasks are either: immediately, or after the interval expires.

Something like:

new SimpleIntervalJob({ seconds: 300, runImmediately: true, startDelay: 60 }, task)

Would delay 60 seconds, then run the task every 300 seconds.

[MatthewMaclean]

This would be helpful for avoiding a thundering herd of cron on startup.

[kibertoad]

good idea! will add

[wavedeck]

Here's a workaround you could use to delay the scheduling of a job by an arbitrary number of milliseconds by wrapping the scheduling in a setTimeout:

// initialize a new scheduler
const scheduler = new ToadScheduler();

// create a new scheduler task
const task = new Task("sometask", () => {
  // do whatever you want in there
});

// create a new job that runs every x minutes
const job = new SimpleIntervalJob(
  { minutes: 30, runImmediately: true }, // run immediately once scheduled
  task
);

// delay scheduling of task by an arbitrary amount of milliseconds
// e.g. 15_000 for a delay of 15 seconds 
setTimeout(() => {
  scheduler.addSimpleIntervalJob(job);
}, 15_000); 

[wavedeck]

what's the status on this? i haven't seen much activity working on toad-scheduler since February 2024 and while i understand that the maintainer might have other things going on in life right now and appreciate all of the work put in, it would be nice to see some new issues resolved. Maybe it could be worth it to use GitHub's discussions feature to put up a help wanted board for new users that want to support this library!