Dirstarter recommends hosting your project on Vercel for the best experience. We provide a pre-configured cron job for publishing tools on schedule. Vercel offers up to 2 cron jobs running in the Hobby plan (free tier) and 40 jobs per month in the Pro plan.

It is by far the easiest way to set up automated publishing on schedule, but you can also use any other cron job service you want. A pretty popular, free service for cron jobs is cron-job.org.

Publish Tools Job

The publish tools job is a cron job that publishes scheduled content. It is configured to be triggered every day at midnight.

{
  "crons": [
    {
      "path": "/api/cron/publish",
      "schedule": "0 0 * * *" // Every day at midnight
    }
  ]
}

Securing the endpoint

/api/cron/publish is protected by a required CRON_SECRET. The endpoint rejects any request whose Authorization header is not Bearer <CRON_SECRET>, so set this variable before scheduling the job:

CRON_SECRET="a-long-random-string"

On Vercel, scheduled requests automatically include Authorization: Bearer <CRON_SECRET> once the variable is set, so no extra setup is needed. With any other scheduler (such as cron-job.org), add the header to the request yourself.