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🕐 Schedule Trigger

The Schedule Trigger fires a workflow automatically at regular intervals defined by a cron expression. No external system needs to send a request — Flusso watches the clock and starts the workflow for you, making it the right choice for any repeating task: daily reports, nightly data syncs, hourly health checks, and more.

Category: Triggers · Type identifier: schedule_trigger

Overview

Scheduled automation is one of the most common patterns in workflow tooling. Rather than relying on a human to remember to run a task, or building a separate cron job on your own server, you can configure a Flusso workflow to run itself on any recurring schedule — from every minute to once a year.

The schedule is defined using a standard five-part cron expression, the same syntax used by Linux cron, GitHub Actions, and most scheduling systems. If you are not familiar with cron syntax, the examples below cover the most common patterns. There are also free online tools such as crontab.guru where you can type an expression and see it described in plain English.

When the schedule fires, the workflow runs with an empty input context except for a single scheduled_at timestamp that tells subsequent steps exactly when the run was triggered. The workflow must be in Active status for the schedule to execute; if the workflow is paused or in draft, scheduled runs are silently skipped.

Configuration

Field	Required	Description
Cron Expression	Required	A standard five-part cron expression specifying when the workflow should run. The five parts represent: minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week.

Cron Expression Format

# ┌─────────── minute (0–59) # │ ┌─────────── hour (0–23) # │ │ ┌─────────── day of month (1–31) # │ │ │ ┌─────────── month (1–12) # │ │ │ │ ┌─────────── day of week (0–7, 0 and 7 = Sunday) # │ │ │ │ │ * * * * *

Common Examples

# 9:00 AM every weekday (Monday–Friday) 0 9 * * 1-5 # Midnight every day 0 0 * * * # Every 15 minutes */15 * * * * # 8:00 AM on the first day of every month 0 8 1 * * # Every hour 0 * * * * # Every Sunday at 6:00 PM 0 18 * * 0 # Twice a day: midnight and noon 0 0,12 * * *

Output Data

Variable	Type	Description
`trigger.output.scheduled_at`	String (ISO 8601)	The ISO 8601 timestamp of when the scheduled run was triggered, e.g. `2026-03-12T09:00:00Z`.

// Use the scheduled timestamp in downstream steps {{ trigger.output.scheduled_at }} // Example: include in an email subject Daily report for {{ trigger.output.scheduled_at }}

Example Usage

Nightly data export at midnight

Add a Schedule Trigger and enter the cron expression 0 0 * * * to run at midnight every day.
Add an HTTP Request node to fetch the data you want to export from your internal API.
Add a Google Drive node (or Local File node) to write the fetched data to a file. Use {{ trigger.output.scheduled_at }} in the filename so each nightly export gets a unique, timestamped file name.
Set the workflow to Active in the workflow settings. The schedule will begin firing at the next midnight.

Tips & Notes

Workflow must be Active. Scheduled runs only fire when the workflow is in Active status. Draft and paused workflows will not execute, even if the schedule time arrives.

Use crontab.guru to check your expression. Visit crontab.guru, paste your cron expression, and it will describe the schedule in plain English and show the next scheduled times.

All times are UTC. Cron expressions are evaluated in Coordinated Universal Time. If you need to run at 9 AM in a specific local timezone, convert that time to UTC first. For example, 9 AM Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5) would be 0 14 * * *.
Minimum interval is one minute. You cannot schedule a workflow to run more frequently than once per minute.
Missed runs are not retried. If a scheduled run is missed (for example, because the server was briefly unavailable at the scheduled time), Flusso will not back-fill the missed run. The next run occurs at the next scheduled time.
Use a Manual Trigger for testing. The Schedule Trigger does not have a test button — add a Manual Trigger temporarily to test the rest of your workflow logic without waiting for the schedule to fire.

Related Nodes

Manual Trigger — fire the workflow immediately on demand.
Event Trigger — fire the workflow when another workflow emits a named event.