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title: "Cron" description: "Schedule recurring commands and agent sessions with cron, including overlap handling, monitoring, and cancellation." category: "Orchestration" order: 1

Run work on a schedule inside a VM — a shell command on a fixed interval, or a recurring agent session that reviews logs or triages issues. Reach for this when you need background jobs that fire on a cron expression instead of on demand.

How it works

Each VM handle exposes scheduleCron({ schedule, action, overlap }). The schedule is a standard cron expression, and the action is either an exec (run a command with args) or a session (spawn an agent of a given agentType with a prompt). The overlap policy decides what happens when a run is still going when the next tick arrives. Scheduling returns a job id you can later pass to cancelCronJob, and listCronJobs enumerates everything registered on the VM. Subscribe to the native cronEvent event on a connection to monitor each run; timestamps are ISO strings in both events and job metadata.

Run it

npm install
npx tsx server.ts   # start the registry, then run any example, e.g. npx tsx schedule-session.ts

You should see the cron job registered and its id printed; scheduled runs fire on their interval and surface as cronEvents.

Source

View the source on GitHub: https://github.com/rivet-dev/agent-os/tree/main/examples/cron