Sleeps

Two step methods, step.sleep and step.sleepUntil, are available to pause the execution of your function for a specific amount of time. Your function can sleep for seconds, minutes, or days, up to a maximum of one year.

Using sleep methods can avoid the need to run multiple cron jobs or use additional queues. For example, Sleeps enable you to create a user onboarding workflow that sequences multiple actions in time: first send a welcome email, then send a tutorial each day for a week.

How Sleeps work

step.sleep and step.sleepUntil tell Inngest to resume execution of your function at a future time. Your code doesn't need to be running during the sleep interval, allowing sleeps to be used in any environment, even serverless platforms.

A Function paused by a sleeping Step doesn't affect your account capacity; i.e. it does not count against your plan's concurrency limit. A sleeping Function doesn't count against any concurrency policy you've set on the function, either.

Pausing an execution for a given time

Use step.sleep() to pause the execution of your function for a specific amount of time.

export default inngest.createFunction(
  { id: "send-delayed-email" },
  { event: "app/user.signup" },
  async ({ event, step }) => {
    await step.sleep("wait-a-couple-of-days", "2d");
    // Do something else
  }
);

Check out the step.sleep() TypeScript reference.

Pausing an execution until a given date

Use step.sleepUntil() to pause the execution of your function until a specific date time.

export default inngest.createFunction(
  { id: "send-scheduled-reminder" },
  { event: "app/reminder.scheduled" },
  async ({ event, step }) => {
    const date = new Date(event.data.remind_at);
    await step.sleepUntil("wait-for-scheduled-reminder", date);
    // Do something else
  }
);

Check out the step.sleepUntil() TypeScript reference.