You can use cron jobs to execute pipelines on time-based schedules. You can create and manage cron jobs from the repository Settings screen, or using the command line tools.

Example creates a cron job named hourly using a cron expression:

$ drone cron add "octocat/hello-world" "hourly" "0 0 * * * *"

Example creates a cron job named deploy using a pre-defined schedule:
```
$ drone cron add "octocat/hello-world" "deploy" @daily
```

Please note that Cron scheduling is disabled on Drone Cloud. This feature is only available when self-hosting.

Expressions

The cron expression represents a set of times, using 6 space-separated fields, including seconds.

Most examples on the internet represent the times using 5 space-separated fields and exclude seconds. Excluding seconds will lead to unexpected behavior.

Field name	Mandatory?	Allowed values	Allowed characters
Seconds	Yes	0-59	* / , -
Minutes	Yes	0-59	* / , -
Hours	Yes	0-23	* / , -
Day of month	Yes	1-31	* / , - ?
Month	Yes	1-12 or JAN-DEC	* / , -
Day of week	Yes	0-6 or SUN-SAT	* / , - ?

Use one of several pre-defined schedules in place of a cron expression.

Entry	Expression	Description
@yearly	0 0 0 1 1 *	Run once a year, midnight, Jan. 1st
@monthly	0 0 0 1 * *	Run once a month, midnight, first of month
@weekly	0 0 0 * * 0	Run once a week, midnight between Sat/Sun
@daily	0 0 0 * * *	Run once a day, midnight
@hourly	0 0 * * * *	Run once an hour, beginning of hour

Timezones

The current implementation calculates the execution time based on UTC as opposed to local time.

Scheduling

The cron scheduler is approximate and executes jobs in hourly batches. This means cron jobs can be processed up to one hour after the scheduled execution time, and jobs scheduled with high frequency can only execute once per hour. This prevents users from creating high frequency jobs and overloading the system, but as a result, means cron scheduling has less accurate timing.

You can reduce the one hour window and increase scheduler accuracy by changing the server’s cron interval setting.

Customize the Cron Interval

Pipelines

The cron scheduler executes all matching pipelines and steps defined in your yaml configuration file. See the pipeline configuration documentation to limit cron execution of pipelines and pipeline steps:

Limit Pipeline Execution Limit Pipeline Step Execution