Golang Cron Job vs time.Ticker用例

Question

I need to implement a service for my web server that refreshes an access token from some outside rest-api because that token has a 10 minute expiration time. (This is not an accesstoken that my server produces, it is a token I receive from an outside api that allows me to use their services for a limited time)

For implementing timed functions in Go I've come across both cronjobs and functions using time.Ticker, however I havent come across any posts on the advantages/disadvantages of using one over the other and would like to one which would possibly be a better use for my situation.

If there is an optional route I'd be open to exploring it as well.

Thank you

Answer 1

time.Ticker is included with the Go standard library. No "cron" library is. So you reduce your external dependencies by using time.Ticker.

Cron is designed to run jobs on a specified schedule. Usually these jobs are run outside the Go program by the operating system. This isn't quite what you want. There are other job runners, and libraries called "cron" which are actually job runners, but again they're third party libraries.

A time.Ticker inside a goroutine is very simple and you can just have a nice infinite loop that fetches an API token every few minutes and sends it down a channel to wherever it's needed. That's maybe eight lines of code.