Background workers and REST services in Meteor

I have a meteor app and would like to add two features to it.

  1. The first is to schedule background tasks, sort of like cron jobs, on the server.
  2. The second is to add an HTTP endpoint to act as a REST URL. The idea is to add an HTTP API to the data.

Can these two features be accomplished using meteor or Node ?

Node has several cron modules: https://npmjs.org/search?q=cron. If you want to write REST interfaces then restify comes highly recommended: https://npmjs.org/package/restify

You can use npm modules using the following method (warning to future readers, meteor like node.js is in a constant state of flux. this information may already be out of date) : https://shiggyenterprises.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/accessing-the-file-system-in-meteor/

If you want to go meteor native, there's actually two packages that might meet your requirements:

reststop - https://atmosphere.meteor.com/package/reststop cron - https://atmosphere.meteor.com/package/cron

Atmosphere is a community supported package repo.