Coderweekend

Create a cron job with GitHub Actions

GitHub provides a free way to create a cron job via GitHub Actions.

To create a cron job.

  1. Create a .github/workflows directory in your project root directory.
  2. In the .github/workflows directory, create a yml file. You can name this file anything you want. I named it nightly-build.yml to indicate that it will run every night.
  3. Copy the following YAML contents into the nightly-build.yml file:
name: Nightly build
on:
  schedule:
  - cron: '0 0 * * *'
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Nightly command
      run: echo "Nightly command."

The part which triggers a cron job is the cron key that sits inside on.schedule.

At the specified time, the workflow will run the jobs specified in jobs. In this case, I set it to midnight (0 0 * * *).

  1. Commit this new file to GitHub.

That's all you need to do.

View your workflow on GitHub #

To verify that the action is registered correctly.

  1. Go to https://github.com/.

  2. Click the "Actions" tab.


    Actions.
    Actions.

  3. In the left sidebar, you will see the workflow you just created. in this example, "Nightly build".

  4. Once the specified time is met, you will see the run in the workflow history.


    Workflow run.
    Workflow run.

  5. Click on the run to see all the jobs that run in that specific workflow. In this case, we only have a "build" job.


    build job.
    build job.

  6. Click on the "build" job to see the build's detail.


    Build detail.
    Build detail.

Things you should know about the GitHub schedule #

  • The Github schedule run based on UTC times using POSIX cron syntax.
  • Scheduled workflows run on the latest commit on the default or base branch.
  • The shortest interval you can run scheduled workflows is once every 5 minutes.