Automate scripts using offly + crontab

crontab is installed in all containers built with the offly image. You can use it to automate any bash scripts or commands and have it run 24/7.

# Use this to edit the cron file
crontab -e

To learn how to write crontab schedules, click here.

Run a Node.js web server

You can run any Node.js web server in an offly docker container just like on your computer.

First, inside the container, install a server software like express using NPM:

npm install express

Then you can write any server code in a .js file and run it:

// server.js
const app = require("express")();

app.get("/", function(req, res) {
  res.send("Hello world!");
});

app.listen(8080);

node server.js

To visit a server running inside your container or use it as an API, use https://offly.pagekite.me/containers/API_KEY/CONTAINER_NAME/PORT, replacing with actual values as needed.

Tip: If you run any server or forever-running command from your Container Dashboard, then close the browser/tab, the command will keep running in the background of your container. Any output will go to your logs. This is convenient for running web servers just like Node.js!

Run a Python web server

This is just a quick way to run a python web server using Python, but you can write any Python server you want - this is just an example:

# Starts a file server on port 3000
python3 -m http.server

Run offly inside of offly

Yes, that's right! You can use the node-offly Node.js module and automate offly containers or other APIs using Node.js.

npm install node-offly

// Example for updating a file
// inside your offly container
// on a schedule

const offly = require("node-offly");
offly.init("XXX");

setInterval(function() {
  offly.execCommand("MyAwesomeContainer", "echo $(date) > current_date.txt");
}, 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000); // Once a day

node script.js

Run an Nginx web server

If you built a container using the nginx:alpine image, all you need to do is start the container and the server will run automatically.

To add more pages or edit them, all webpages/files for the server will be located in /usr/share/nginx/html.