How to configure a cron job on Open edX (Ulmo / Tutor v21)?

Hi everyone,

We’re running Open edX Ulmo on Tutor v21 deployed on AWS EC2. As part of a customization, we’ve built a Django management command that sends scheduled notifications to users, and we need to run it every 15 minutes via cron:

*/15 * * * * python manage.py lms run_scheduled_notifications

I’m not sure about the right approach to configure this in a Tutor-based setup — since everything runs inside Docker containers, a simple host-level crontab entry doesn’t feel like the correct way to do it.

A few questions I have:

  1. Should this be configured as a host-level cron that runs tutor local exec lms ..., or is there a Tutor-native way to handle this?
  2. Is there an existing Tutor plugin hook or pattern for registering periodic tasks?
  3. Are there any pitfalls to watch out for — for example, environment variables, the correct Python path inside the container, or Django settings?

Any pointers to official documentation or community examples would be really helpful.

Thanks in advance!