Scheduled Workflows

~9 min · schedule, cron, nightly

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Cron in YAML

on: schedule with a cron expression runs the workflow on a recurring schedule. UTC, 5-field cron, repo must have activity (no commits in 60 days = scheduled workflows pause).

Common patterns

Nightly full test suite — runs the long, expensive matrix every night so PRs only see the smoke subset.
Dependency updates — Dependabot does this for you, but you can also run npm outdated, pip-audit, etc., on a schedule.
Security scans — weekly CodeQL, monthly trivy.
Stale issue / PR reaper — actions/stale.
Health checks — periodic curls against your prod URL with Slack alerts on failure.

Caveats

UTC always.
GitHub may delay scheduled runs at peak load — don't depend on millisecond accuracy.
Pair with workflow_dispatch on the same workflow so you can also run it manually for debugging.

Code

Nightly + manual·yaml

name: nightly
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 6 * * *'    # daily at 06:00 UTC
  workflow_dispatch: {}

jobs:
  full-test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    timeout-minutes: 60
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: ./run-full-suite.sh

External links

GitHub — schedule reference

Exercise

Add a nightly workflow that runs your slow test matrix at 06:00 UTC and pair it with workflow_dispatch. Trigger it manually, watch it run; then wait one night and confirm the schedule fired.

Progress

Progress is local-only — sign in to sync across devices.

← PreviousManual Inputs (workflow_dispatch)Next →Repository Dispatch

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