How to fail a cron job after a certain number of retries

Question

I have a kubernetes cluster of web scrapping cron job set up.Everything works fine until a cron job fails to start.

Whats the issue?

Here is the config for reference:

apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: scrape-al
spec:
  schedule: '*/15 * * * *'
  concurrencyPolicy: Allow
  failedJobsHistoryLimit: 0
  successfulJobsHistoryLimit: 0
  jobTemplate:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: scrape
        scrape: al
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: scrape-al
              image: 'govhawk/openstates:1.3.1-beta'
              command:
                - /opt/openstates/openstates/pupa-scrape.sh
              args:
                - al bills --scrape
          restartPolicy: Never
      backoffLimit: 3

Answer 1

You're trying to set 3 asbackoffLimit of your Job. That means when a Job is created by CronJob, It will retry 3 times if fails. This controls Job, not CronJob

You need to suspend CronJob so than it stop scheduling new Job.

Suspend: true

You can do this manually. If you do not want to do this manually, you need to setup a watcher, that will watch your CronJob status, and will update CronJob to suspend if necessary.