Schedule jobs. See every run.

Sextant is an open-source CLI and HTTP API for background jobs: cron and delayed schedules, retries you can reason about, and a record of every attempt. These are its docs.

Start the quickstart Browse the API

curl -fsSL https://get.sextant.example | sh

Start here

Three short paths. Each ends with a job you can watch run.

Install

Binary, Docker image or package manager. Pick the store that fits: SQLite for one machine, Postgres for a fleet.

sextant version 02

Run your first job

Start a server, register a handler, enqueue a job and follow it from queued to succeeded in five minutes.

sextant run send-receipt 03

Learn the model

Jobs, queues, schedules, workers and leases: the six ideas the rest of the documentation builds on.

queue / job / run

Popular guides

What people read after the quickstart.

01Scheduling jobsCron, intervals, time zones and what happens when a run overlaps the last one.02Retries and backoffSet attempts, backoff and jitter per queue, and send hopeless jobs to the dead queue.03ObservabilityMetrics, structured logs and traces for every attempt, with an example dashboard.04WebhooksGet job events pushed to your service, and verify the signature on each delivery.05DeployingDocker, Kubernetes and systemd recipes, plus graceful shutdown for workers.06Migrating from v1The config changes, renamed commands and the one data migration you have to run.

One job, four ways to create it

The SDKs are thin wrappers over the REST API, so what you learn in one carries to the others. Your language choice is remembered across every example in these docs.

Typed clients for Node, Python and Go, generated from the same API description.
Idempotency keys on every create, so a retried request never makes a second job.
Every code sample in the API reference is generated from src/data/api.json.

NodeTypeScript

import { Sextant } from '@sextant/node';

const sextant = new Sextant({ token: process.env.SEXTANT_TOKEN });

await sextant.jobs.create({
  queue: 'emails',
  handler: 'send-receipt',
  payload: { orderId: 'ord_4412' },
  runAt: '2026-10-20T09:15:00Z',
});

PythonPython

import os
from sextant import Sextant

client = Sextant(token=os.environ["SEXTANT_TOKEN"])

client.jobs.create(
    queue="emails",
    handler="send-receipt",
    payload={"order_id": "ord_4412"},
    run_at="2026-10-20T09:15:00Z",
)

GoGo

client := sextant.NewClient(os.Getenv("SEXTANT_TOKEN"))

_, err := client.Jobs.Create(ctx, &sextant.JobCreateParams{
	Queue:   "emails",
	Handler: "send-receipt",
	Payload: map[string]any{"order_id": "ord_4412"},
	RunAt:   "2026-10-20T09:15:00Z",
})

cURLShell

curl -X POST https://api.sextant.example/v2/jobs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SEXTANT_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"queue":"emails","handler":"send-receipt","payload":{"order_id":"ord_4412"}}'

What is new

Latest releases. Full changelog

Oct 14, 2026v2.4.0Pause queues, read the whole attempt timelineQueues can be paused and resumed without a restart, and sextant inspect now shows every attempt of a job on one timeline.Sep 22, 2026v2.3.1Schedules survive daylight saving changesA patch release for schedule drift around DST changes and a stricter webhook signature check.Aug 26, 2026v2.3.0Queue wait metrics and the overlap policyA histogram for how long jobs wait in a queue, an overlap option for schedules, and an async Python client.