# Scheduled publication

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

## Introduction

This guide will use this [draft system](./draft.md) 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](../concepts/configurations.md#cron-tasks) of this feature.

**Path —** `./config/functions/cron.js`

```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`

```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!