Upload WebJob to Azure App service with predefined schedule

As you probably know in Azure Portal it is possible to create Azure web jobs with Type = Triggered and specify CRON expression which will define schedule of the job. In this post I will describe how to create Azure web job with predefined CRON expression.

Before to start we need to create Azure app service in the tenant and prepare zip file with executable file for web job itself. Usually it can be created by archiving bin/Release (or bin/Debug) folder of the console project with web job logic. However there is one important detail: in order to set schedule of web job we need to add special file to the project called settings.job and define CRON expression inside this file. E.g. if we want our job to run every 15 minutes we need to define it like this:

{“schedule”: “* */15 * * * *”}

After that also go to File properties in Visual Studio and set "Copy to target directory value to “Copy Always”. After that compile project and create zip file from bin/Release (or bin/Debug) folder.

Next step is to create web job from zip file. It can be done by the following convenient command line util available on github: WAWSDeploy. With this tool web job can be created created e.g. from PowerShell by running the following command:

WAWSDeploy.exe MyPackage.zip publishSettings.txt /t "app_data\jobs\triggered\MyJob"

In this command publishSettings.txt is the file with publishing settings for your App service. It can be created by Get-AzureRmWebAppPublishingProfile cmdlet. This command will create new web job called MyJob based on provided zip file with predefined schedule.