Schedule a Nightly Job

Run a workflow automatically every night — useful for reports, sync jobs, and housekeeping without manual triggers.

Goal

At 02:00 Europe/Bucharest daily, fetch data from an API, write a summary to a log, and update a global variable with the last run time.

Step 1 — Cron Schedule trigger

1. Create a new workflow and add Cron Schedule as the only trigger.
2. Inspector:
   • Cron Expression — 0 2 * * * (02:00 every day).
   • Timezone — Europe/Bucharest (or your IANA zone).
   • Description — Nightly sync.

Five-field order: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week. See Cron Schedule reference.

Step 2 — Build the job body

1. Add HTTP Request — GET your data source.
2. Add Transform or Log to record row count or status.
3. Add Write Variable — set global key lastNightlySync to {{$now}}.

Step 3 — Dry Run and validate

1. Dry Run simulates the graph; the cron timer does not fire during dry run.
2. Fix validation errors, then Activate the workflow.

Step 4 — Monitor schedules

Open Jobs panel:

• History — past scheduled runs.
• Schedule — upcoming cron fires for Active workflows.
• Failed — retries and dead-letter review.
• Variables — confirm lastNightlySync updated.

See Jobs Panel for tab details.

Common cron examples

Tips

• Long-running jobs: add timeout handling on HTTP nodes and log duration.
• Use Approval gates only when the nightly job performs dangerous actions.
• On runtime agents, cron is embedded in the export manifest and runs headless.

See also

• Cron Schedule
• Global Variables
• Export Runtime to Edge