node-cron

Add cron.shutdown(timeout?) for graceful process teardown

Add unref option for heartbeat timers

day-of-month: Quartz-style W, L-n and ? modifiers

Emit task:failed when a background daemon exits unexpectedly

lastRun() introspection getter on ScheduledTask: returns { date, result } after a successful execution, { date, error } after a failed one, or null before the first run.

Extended day-of-week tokens: <weekday>#<nth> (nth weekday of the month, e.g. 1#1 for the first Monday) and <weekday>L (last weekday of the month, e.g. 5L for the last Friday).

Cache Intl.DateTimeFormat instances per timezone instead of rebuilding on every call.

Parse the cron expression once per TimeMatcher instead of re-parsing in MatcherWalker.

Distributed run coordination — opt-in distributed: true runs a task on a single instance per fire across a fleet (the #477 use case). Ships a built-in NODE_CRON_RUN env-var default (one designated runner, no dependencies) and a pluggable RunCoordinator (via setRunCoordinator, or the per-task runCoordinator option) for high-availability, per-fire coordination (e.g. a Redis lock). Adds the distributedTtl option and an execution:skipped event carrying a reason ('not-elected' | 'coordinator-error'). Works for inline and background tasks. (#549, closes #477)

Task introspection on ScheduledTask: getNextRuns(n) (preview the next N run times), match(date), msToNext(), isBusy(), runsLeft() and getPattern().

cron.parse(expression) and cron.validateDetailed(expression) — decompose an expression into its fields, or get every field-level problem (without throwing) for tooling and richer error messages.

getNextMatch no longer scans every time of day on a day that matches the day-of-month but not the weekday. A dense expression constrained by both (e.g. * * * 15 * 1) could take minutes to resolve; it is now instant.