I don't really use schedulers for work and have never really worked with them. So this may sound trivial but do i have to keep a terminal open and the script running for this to work? Or it works in the background like cron jobs? If i have to keep a terminal alive for it, what is a scheduler's advantage over using a good old fashioned loop with a sleep or time on the function call?
Putting it mildly, this is nothing more than a sophisticated Python while loop. And it's not as performance friendly as Cron due to that Rocketry runs on Python. You need to be able to leave Python program running in order to use Rocketry. As bad as that sounds, it's not really a problem with modern machines though. Have run this on Raspberry and with a machine with even poorer specs.
However, this has a lot of features that Cron doesn't and which are not obvious to create yourself like create task dependencies (like "run this after that has succeeded or this has succeeded"), error management, integrating with APIs, parametrizing etc. Also if you need to run concurrently/parallel tasks, you be facing a lot of odd errors due to race conditions if you tried to do it yourself in a loop. I have even found a bug in Python's time/datetime modules while developing Rocketry. It sounds easy but I advice you don't go to the same rabbit hole as I did. Please don't, it's not good for mental health.
Of course if you need something very simple, go ahead and do it with a simple loop. Rocketry however makes easy and complex problems easy so it's still a good candidate as in case you realize your problem was more complex than you thought, it possibly has the answer or an obvious way to implement.
Compared to similar alternatives like Celery or Airflow, (I think) it is much easier to set up and more complex scheduling problems are much easier with Rocketry than with them. Of course if you are a data engineer, I suggest to use Airflow as that's the industry standard.
To tackle one bit of GP's question that might not be clear, you would not need to leave the terminal open. From the terminal, you can run the app and detach its process from the terminal, thus running it in the background.
