What Is a Scheduled Pipeline? Running on a Cron Timer
A scheduled pipeline runs automatically at set times defined by a cron-style schedule, independent of any code change.
Most pipelines react to events: a push, a pull request. A scheduled pipeline runs on the clock instead. You give it a schedule (every night at 2am, every hour, every Monday) and it fires on that cadence whether or not anything changed. Scheduled pipelines are how teams run periodic work that does not map to a single commit.
What a schedule looks like
Schedules are usually expressed as cron syntax: five fields for minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week. The CI system evaluates them and starts a run each time the schedule matches.
What scheduled pipelines do
- Nightly builds and full test suites.
- Periodic dependency and security scans.
- Recurring data jobs or cleanup tasks.
- Cache warming or environment refreshes.
A quick example
A trigger cron: "0 3 * * 1" runs the pipeline every Monday at 3am, ideal for a weekly dependency-update or full regression run that is too slow to run on every commit.
Which commit does it run?
A scheduled run usually executes against the latest commit on a chosen branch (often the default branch). Unlike a push trigger, there is no specific new commit, so it picks up wherever the branch currently sits.
Scheduled pipelines and cost
Schedules run whether or not they are needed, so they steadily consume compute. Right-size their frequency and run them off-peak. Metered runners (Latchkey) show exactly what each scheduled run costs so you can tune the cadence.
Key takeaways
- A scheduled pipeline runs on a cron-style timer, not on code changes.
- It suits nightly builds, scans, and recurring maintenance work.
- It runs against the latest commit on a branch, so tune frequency for cost.