strapi/docs/3.0.0-beta.x/guides/schedule-article.md

Schedule article

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

Introduction

This guide will use this draft system guide. So first read it 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 published_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 published_at with datetime type

And add some data with different dates and status to be able to see a plublication happen. Some entries need to have draft status and a published_at date lower that your current date.

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

Create a CRON task

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

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.

Business login

Now we can start to write the code that will fetch all draft Articles that have a published_at lower than 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',
      published_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!