Cron Jobs Without Babysitting: Build Scheduled Automation into Your Flowork Agent

The core promise of any agent system is consistency: fire-and-forget work that happens whether you're watching or not. That's where scheduling enters — not as a luxury, but as a necessary half of the automation engine.

What Scheduling Is (and Isn't)

In Flowork, a schedule is a time-based job that an agent or group runs on a clock. You give it a cron time — the Unix standard five-field format (minute hour day_of_month month day_of_week) — and it fires on that beat. 0 7 * * * means 7 a.m. every day. 0 */6 * * * means every six hours. 30 2 * * 0 means 2:30 a.m. every Sunday.

Scheduling is paired with Trigger as two halves of the same automation engine:

• Trigger = event-based (a Telegram message arrives, an HTTP webhook rings, a file is modified).
• Schedule = time-based (a cron line fires).

Both follow the same execution path inside the kernel — the difference is why the job starts.

Setting Up a Scheduled Job

From the Schedule menu, hit ＋ New. You'll see:

1. Pick a target: an agent or a group.
2. Write what it does: prose instruction or a task name ("Check email and summarize unread," "Run the daily security scan," "Fetch the latest rates").
3. Set the cron time: five fields, standard syntax.
4. Repeat or once: the scheduler can fire the job every interval, or just once on a specific date+time.

The job appears as a card with five buttons:

• Enable/Disable toggle: turn it on or off without deleting it.
• ▷ Run: execute it right now (doesn't change the schedule).
• ✎ Edit: change the instruction, cron time, or target.
• ▸ History: see all past runs — when it fired, what the agent said, how long it took, any errors.
• 🗑 Delete: remove the job permanently.

Real Patterns

Recurring daily digest: 0 9 * * * (9 a.m. every day) sends your agent a task like "Summarize today's news from Hacker News and Lobsters, and write me one paragraph."

Weekly report: 0 8 * * 1 (8 a.m. every Monday) tells an agent "Generate this week's activity report" — it pulls its own memory and compiles what happened.

Off-hours cleanup: 0 23 * * * (11 p.m. daily) runs a housekeeping task: "Archive completed tickets, clear the temp folder, and log what you did."

Hourly health check: 0 * * * * (every hour on the hour) pings a service or dataset and alerts you if something's odd.

Once at startup: Set a cron time in the far future (e.g., 0 0 31 12 * — Dec 31 at midnight, a date that rarely arrives) and toggle Once, so it fires only when you manually trigger it or the system boots.

Under the Hood

Each scheduled job lives in Flowork's automation engine — the same kernel that handles triggers. When the system clock reaches a scheduled time, the kernel:

1. Looks up the job card.
2. Checks if it's enabled.
3. Sends the instruction to the target agent or group.
4. Runs it in sandbox (same as a manual message).
5. Logs the result: success, wall-clock time, full output, any errors.

You can inspect the history of any job — every run is timestamped and archived. If a job fails, the entry shows exactly why.

Offline behavior: If your machine is asleep or the binary isn't running at the scheduled time, the job won't fire — Flowork doesn't queue missed jobs. You can run it manually with the ▷ Run button if you need a late execution.

Why This Matters

Without scheduling, your agent is a pet — something you talk to, but it never acts on its own. With it, your agent becomes a helper: it watches, digests, summarizes, alerts, and reports without you asking. Pair scheduling with a connected channel (Telegram, Discord, email) and your agent can push updates to you instead of waiting for you to pull.

The same agent that answers your questions in chat can also be your daily briefing robot, your off-hours janitor, your weekly auditor — all without a separate tool. One folder, one mind, one constitution.

Next: See History to understand how logs are kept, or Trigger to learn event-based automation.

Scheduling Agent Automation with Cron

Flowork is open source — both products:

• 🤖 Flowork Agent (the self-hosted agent OS): https://github.com/flowork-os/Flowork_Agent
• 🛣️ Flow Router (the sovereign LLM gateway): https://github.com/flowork-os/flowork_Router