Automate Recurring Agent Tasks with Octop Cron Jobs

Schedule your Octop agents to run prompts automatically. Use cron expressions or natural-language triggers to automate daily reports and reminders.

Octop lets you schedule your agents to run prompts automatically on a cron schedule — useful for daily summaries, morning briefings, or recurring checks. A cron job fires without any manual input, so your agents can deliver results while you focus on other work.

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How cron jobs work

Every cron job has four parts:

• Name — a display label in the task list. The web UI asks you to fill one in. The API can omit it and derive a label from the prompt.
• Trigger — when the job fires (a cron expression, an interval, or a one-time timestamp)
• Prompt — the message sent to the agent (up to 2,000 characters)
• Task type — Agent has the LLM process the prompt and generate a response; Text pushes the prompt directly as a plain message without LLM involvement

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Create a cron job

1. Open the Tasks section

   Go to Tasks in the sidebar and select the agent the job belongs to.

2. Start a new job

   Click Create task.

3. Name the job

   Enter a display name so you can tell jobs apart in the list.

4. Set the trigger

   Enter a cron expression (for example, 0 9 * * * for 9 AM daily) or use an interval shorthand such as interval:30 for every 30 minutes.

5. Write the prompt

   Type your prompt in the prompt field. The limit is 2,000 characters.

6. Choose the task type

   Select Agent to have the LLM process the prompt and generate a reply, or Text to send the prompt directly as a message.

7. Save

   Click Save. The job is now active and will fire on the next matching trigger.

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Trigger formats

Format	Example	Description
Cron expression	0 9 * * *	Standard 5-field cron — fires at 9 AM every day
Interval	interval:30	Fires every 30 minutes from the moment the job is saved
One-time	date:2025-01-15T09:00:00	ISO 8601 timestamp — fires once at the specified time

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Monitor and run jobs

The task list shows each job’s schedule, type, prompt, last run time, and last status, so you can confirm a job is firing as expected. Each row carries Enable and Run now actions — Run now triggers the job immediately without waiting for its next scheduled time, which is the quickest way to verify a new job works.

For CLI create, list, delete, and run-now, see Channel & cron commands.

Set the OCTOP_DEFAULT_TIMEZONE environment variable or add a "default_timezone" key to your config.json to control which timezone Octop uses when evaluating cron expressions. Without this, the server’s system timezone is used.