Automating Your Workflows On A Schedule Github Actions Cron

Leo Migdal

-Nov 3, 2025, 2:25 AM

automating your workflows on a schedule github actions cron

This article was last updated on January 12, 2025, to include advanced techniques for configuring cron schedules in GitHub Actions, such as handling timezone conversions, scheduling workflows with multiple conditions, and debugging inactive or... What is GitHub Actions cron? GitHub Actions cron is the feature that allows you to schedule the execution of workflows automatically whenever they reach a certain time. In other words, this is much like setting up bill payments: you set this once, and then it will routinely run on time without your needing to interfere. You define the schedule using cron syntax, for instance, '30 5 * * *' - runs every day at 5:30 AM UTC. After years of automating the CICD pipeline, I must confidently say scheduled workflows are amongst those powerful and, at the same time, very misunderstood GitHub Actions features.

I recall once trying to do a nightly build-the first time was hours into debugging as to why my workflow was not running on schedule. Spoiler alert-just forgot about conversion to UTC. Cron syntax: Think of it in terms of trying to set the alarm clock radio. Just like your alarm must have time to awaken, cron requires the additional five to let it know just at which time: It's like saying: "Wake me up at 5:30 AM every day" - the asterisks mean "every" for that position. Posted on Apr 20 • Originally published at dylanbritz.dev

Ever wanted to automate repetitive tasks without paying for a dedicated server? GitHub Actions offers a powerful (and free!) solution for running scheduled tasks also known as cron jobs. Whether you need to sync data, generate reports, or even run a web scraper on schedule, this guide has you covered! GitHub Actions lets you automate tasks based on various triggers, including time-based schedules using cron syntax. The best part? It's completely free for public repositories, with generous free minute allocations for private repos too.

Remember that public repositories have unlimited free minutes, while private repos get around 2000 minutes/month on free plans. Create a new file at .github/workflows/cron-job.yml in your repository. Learn how to run a task/script on a time-based schedule for free using GitHub Actions In this post, we will go over a simple but yet powerful tool to automate running your script (or a task that you can program) on a time-based schedule. If you run a script manually from time to time, then there is a good chance that you may benefit from automating the process and setting up a schedule to run automatically without you... Just set it up once, and forget about it.

In this post, I use the word task and script interchangeably. Moreover, the YAML file GitHub Actions uses to create the automation of the task/script is called the workflow file. The most important part is to have a script that we want to run. This depends on what your task is. The example I will walk you through is the integration of my Zotero annotations to my Readwise (a paid service that integrates highlights from almost everywhere, like Twitter, Apple Books, etc) account using the... In today’s fast-paced development cycles, automating repetitive tasks like releases is critical to maintaining efficiency and reducing human error.

GitHub Actions, a powerful CI/CD tool integrated directly with GitHub, allows you to automate workflows—including scheduled releases on specific branches. Whether you’re shipping weekly updates, monthly patches, or critical hotfixes, scheduling releases ensures consistency and frees up your team to focus on development. This guide will walk you through creating a GitHub Actions workflow that triggers automatically on a schedule for a specific branch, configuring the release process, testing the workflow, and troubleshooting common issues. By the end, you’ll have a robust, automated release pipeline tailored to your project’s needs. GitHub Actions is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) platform built into GitHub. It lets you automate tasks like building, testing, and deploying code directly from your GitHub repository.

Workflows are defined in YAML files stored in the .github/workflows directory of your repo, and they trigger based on events (e.g., pushes, pull requests, or schedules). Before you begin, ensure you have the following: To schedule a release, you’ll use the schedule trigger, which runs workflows at specified times using cron syntax. Additionally, you’ll need to target a specific branch to ensure releases only run from that branch (e.g., release/main). Sometimes we need to schedule some task in our CI/CD pipelines. This job is not hard in GitHub Actions.

We have an event named schedule to use in these cases and we can use the cron expressions to reach this goal with no difficult. You can use my web app to easily create your cron expression: woliveiras.github.io/cronor. OBS: The * is a special character in YAML so you have to quote this string. We can also trigger one workflow with multiple schedules. And we can access the schedule data in the jobs with this syntax github.event.schedule. Updates the current GitHub Action workflow's cron trigger based on a list of cron expressions

cron expressions are powerful, but if you want to run a task on a specific date and time you are out of luck with GitHub Actions. The best you can do is to set a specific date and time that will trigger yearly. With this action, you can programmatically update the cron schedule for an action. So instead of running your action frequently and then checking if there is anything to do, you can schedule the action to run on a specific date, then update the schedule to run on... Note that ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}} cannot be used for authentication, as it lacks the permission to update files in .github/workflows/. You need to create a personal access token with the workflow scope and save it in your repository's secrets as PAT_WITH_WORKFLOW_SCOPE in order to make the example below work.

Set cron schedule is not certified by GitHub. It is provided by a third-party and is governed by separate terms of service, privacy policy, and support documentation.

Automating Your Workflows On A Schedule Github Actions Cron

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