How to schedule workflows in GitHub Actions

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.

Schedule example:

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 0 12 1 *" // At 12:00 AM, on day 12 of the month, only in January

OBS: The * is a special character in YAML so you have to quote this string.

We can also trigger one workflow with multiple schedules.

Example:

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 0 12 1 *" // At 12:00 AM, on day 12 of the month, only in January
    - cron: "0 12 12 1 *" // At 12:00 PM, on day 12 of the month, only in January

And we can access the schedule data in the jobs with this syntax github.event.schedule.

Example:

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 0 12 1 *"
    - cron: "0 12 12 1 *"

jobs:
  scheduled:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Do not deploy on Fidays!
        if: github.event.schedule != "0 0 * * 5"
        run: echo "You should not deploy on Fridays"

One important thing you can do with this schedule event is enable the Dependabot checks to keep your dependencies updated.

Reference

• Events that trigger workflows

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