Hangfire Background Recurring Jobs — Console Application

3 min readDec 19, 2020

Hangfire is an open-source framework that helps you to create, process and manage your background jobs, i.e. operations you don’t want to put in your request processing pipeline:

https://www.hangfire.io/
Hangfire supports all kind of background tasks — short-running and long-running, CPU intensive and I/O intensive, one shot and recurrent. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel — it is ready to use.

Hangfire supports different types of background jobs:

Fire-and-forget, Background Process, Delayed, Recurring, Continuations, Batches, Batch Continuations

In this article, I am going to explain how to configure Hangfire for processing Background Recurring Jobs in Console Application.

Install the Hangfire package using NuGet

PM> Install-Package Hangfire

In the App.config, add the connecting string to get Hangfire Job Storage as:

<add name=”HangfireConnection” connectionString=”Data Source=GHANSHYAMS\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=Hangfire_Demo;Integrated Security=True;” providerName=”System.Data.SqlClient”/>

Now, install Topshelf package from NuGet and also some more packages like Microsoft.Owin.Host.HttpListener, Microsoft.Owin.Host.SystemWeb & Microsoft.Owin.Hosting

Add the Startup.cs class and configure the Hangfire dashboard.

Recurring Job

The Recurring job structure consists of JobId, Method, Queue, Type, Cron expression

By default Hangfire processes Default queue, but you can also specify your own queue like:

Queue("alpha")]
public void SomeMethod() { }

To begin processing queues, you need to update your BackgroundJobServer configuration.

var options = new BackgroundJobServerOptions
{
    Queues = new[] { "alpha", "beta", "default" }
};

app.UseHangfireServer(options);

Methods to Trigger by Hangfire

After all configurations are done, start the console application and open the below URL in browser as:

http://localhost:8999/hangfire/

You will hangfire dashboard accessed with “/hangfire”.

The hangfire dashboard shows various information about your Recurring Jobs, Servers, Retries, Jobs status — succeeded, failed, processing, deleted, awaiting, scheduled, enqueued