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 (seven days for account on our free tier).

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.