Scheduled publication

What we want here is to be able to set a publication date for an article, and at this date, switch the state to published.

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

And add some data with different dates and state to be able to see the publication happen. Make sure to create some entries with a draft state and a publish_at that is before the current date.

The goal will be to check every minute if there are draft articles that have a publish_at lower that the current date.

Here is the full documentation of this feature. If your CRON task requires to run based on a specific timezone then do look into the full documentation.

Path — ./config/functions/cron.js

Make sure the enabled cron config is set to true in ./config/server.js file.

TIP

Now we can start writing the publishing logic. The code that will fetch all draft Articles with a publish_at that is before the current date.

Then we will update the published_at of all these articles.

Path — ./config/functions/cron.js

module.exports = {
  '*/1 * * * *': async () => {
    // fetch articles to publish
    const draftArticleToPublish = await strapi.api.article.services.article.find({
      _publicationState: 'preview',
    });
    // update published_at of articles
    draftArticleToPublish.forEach(async article => {
      await strapi.api.article.services.article.update(
        { id: article.id },
        { published_at: new Date() }
      );
    });
};

And tada!