Python script to do something at the same time every day

I have a long running python script that I want to do someting at 01:00 every morning.

I have been looking at the sched module and at the Timer object but I can’t see how to use these to achieve this.

Answers:

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Method 1

I spent quite a bit of time also looking to launch a simple Python program at 01:00. For some reason, I couldn’t get cron to launch it and APScheduler seemed rather complex for something that should be simple. Schedule (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/schedule) seemed about right.

You will have to install their Python library:

pip install schedule

This is modified from their sample program:

import schedule
import time

def job(t):
    print "I'm working...", t
    return

schedule.every().day.at("01:00").do(job,'It is 01:00')

while True:
    schedule.run_pending()
    time.sleep(60) # wait one minute

You will need to put your own function in place of job and run it with nohup, e.g.:

nohup python2.7 MyScheduledProgram.py &

Don’t forget to start it again if you reboot.

Method 2

You can do that like this:

from datetime import datetime
from threading import Timer

x=datetime.today()
y=x.replace(day=x.day+1, hour=1, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0)
delta_t=y-x

secs=delta_t.seconds+1

def hello_world():
    print "hello world"
    #...

t = Timer(secs, hello_world)
t.start()

This will execute a function (eg. hello_world) in the next day at 1a.m.

EDIT:

As suggested by @PaulMag, more generally, in order to detect if the day of the month must be reset due to the reaching of the end of the month, the definition of y in this context shall be the following:

y = x.replace(day=x.day, hour=1, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0) + timedelta(days=1)

With this fix, it is also needed to add timedelta to the imports. The other code lines maintain the same. The full solution, using also the total_seconds() function, is therefore:

from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from threading import Timer

x=datetime.today()
y = x.replace(day=x.day, hour=1, minute=0, second=0, microsecond=0) + timedelta(days=1)
delta_t=y-x

secs=delta_t.total_seconds()

def hello_world():
    print "hello world"
    #...

t = Timer(secs, hello_world)
t.start()

Method 3

APScheduler might be what you are after.

from datetime import date
from apscheduler.scheduler import Scheduler

# Start the scheduler
sched = Scheduler()
sched.start()

# Define the function that is to be executed
def my_job(text):
    print text

# The job will be executed on November 6th, 2009
exec_date = date(2009, 11, 6)

# Store the job in a variable in case we want to cancel it
job = sched.add_date_job(my_job, exec_date, ['text'])

# The job will be executed on November 6th, 2009 at 16:30:05
job = sched.add_date_job(my_job, datetime(2009, 11, 6, 16, 30, 5), ['text'])

https://apscheduler.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

You can just get it to schedule another run by building that into the function you are scheduling.

Method 4

I needed something similar for a task. This is the code I wrote:
It calculates the next day and changes the time to whatever is required and finds seconds between currentTime and next scheduled time.

import datetime as dt

def my_job():
    print "hello world"
nextDay = dt.datetime.now() + dt.timedelta(days=1)
dateString = nextDay.strftime('%d-%m-%Y') + " 01-00-00"
newDate = nextDay.strptime(dateString,'%d-%m-%Y %H-%M-%S')
delay = (newDate - dt.datetime.now()).total_seconds()
Timer(delay,my_job,()).start()

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0