title: How to start a dynamic backend using a cron scheduled request in app engine
body: <p>I'm trying to initiate a dynamic backend using a cron task, however after I deploy I don't see the new cron task under the cron tab and also I don't see any instances of backends under my backend tab. What am I doing wrong?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: Now the cron job runs properly (after I changed the schedule to "every 1 minutes". However the backend refuses to run. The cron tab says <code>on time Failed</code>. Maybe I need to define some handler in my app.yaml or something like that?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT2: After using appcfg to update the backends list I can see the backend I defined under backends tab. Now I just have to wait and see if it works (does anybody know of a way to make a get request to the backend with the browser? I don't want to wait an hour just to see if it's running (the cron task runs every hour now).</p>
  
  <h2>My code</h2>
  
  <p>My cron.yaml file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>cron:
  - description: crawler backend activation
    url: /crawl
    target: crawler
    schedule: every minute
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My backends.yaml file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>backends:
  - name: crawler
    class: B1
    instances: 1
    start: crawler.application
    options: dynamic
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My backend handler crawl.py:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import logging
  import webapp2 as webapp
  
  class Handler(webapp.RequestHandler):
      logging.debug('crawler started')
  
  
  
  application = webapp.WSGIApplication([('/crawl', Handler)])
  </code></pre>