I have a workflow I’d like to run automatically on a regular schedule rather than kicking it off by hand or a trigger. How do recurring runs work in 3B? I’m curious how to set the frequency, whether I can control the exact timing, and anything to keep in mind for jobs that run often. A quick walkthrough would be ideal.
Just to square the terminology first: a schedule is one of 3B’s triggers, alongside incoming requests, email, and calls from another workflow. So you’re picking a trigger type, not avoiding triggers.
Setting one up is as simple as asking. “Run this every weekday at 9am” is enough, and 3B adds the schedule to the step you want to start things off. Under the hood it’s a standard five-field cron expression, so you can get pretty specific: every 15 minutes, weekdays only, the 1st of the month at midnight, twice an hour. Describe the timing you want in plain terms and you’ll get the right expression.
Two things that trip people up:
- Schedules only fire on the published main branch. A draft won’t run on its own, which is deliberate, but it means testing has to be a manual run.
- The workflow has to be active. Nothing will happen if it’s paused.
You can spot scheduled workflows by the clock icon in the interface, and hovering over it gives you a plain-English description of the schedule, which is a quick sanity check that you got the timing you meant.
The Cron scheduler doc has the full expression reference.