How to disable run app when using --cron

[Stepashka20]

I need to run my app at 6:00, and only at this time. However, when I run the simple command:

pm2 start app.js --cron "0 6 * * *"

pm2 launches the application immediately. Can I prevent this from happening? The feature of writing logs to 2 different files with a timestamp using the --out and --err options is very useful to me, which can't be done with a Linux cron :(

[soshin1337]

same problem

[alexgalkin]

there is no option for this as far as I know. But I have added the following condition to app.js itself when I had similar requirement:

if (!process.env.prev_restart_delay && process.env.cron_restart) {
  console.log('skipping initial launch....');
  process.exit(0);
  return;
}

this will stop the process immediately but it still will be restarted by cron. Note you should also disable autorestart (--no-autorestart)

Not ideal, but works in my case.

[ultimate-tester]

I'm going through the issues to find mentions about not auto-starting a new process, which I now created a PR for:
#5780

[Unitech]

Feature landed

Update PM2 to 5.4.0

$ npm install pm2@5.4.0 -g
$ pm2 update