Schedule syntax

Two shapes: every <interval> and at <time>.

Intervals

schedule = "every 5m"
schedule = "every 90s"
schedule = "every 6h"
schedule = "every 2d"

An interval is measured from the moment sundial serve started, not from midnight. If you need a run aligned to the clock, use at.

Wall-clock times

schedule = "at 03:17"                  # every day
schedule = "at 03:17 on mon,thu"       # two days a week
schedule = "at 00:00 on day 1"         # first of the month
schedule = "at 09:00,13:00,17:00"      # three times a day

Weekday names are the first three letters, lower case: mon tue wed thu fri sat sun. day N is the day of the month; a job set for day 31 simply does not run in months that do not have one — it is not moved.

Time zones and DST

Schedules are evaluated in the host's local zone unless the job sets one:

job "report" {
    run      = "/opt/report/daily"
    schedule = "at 06:00"
    tz       = "Europe/Berlin"
}

On the day a zone moves to summer time, a job scheduled inside the skipped hour does not run; on the day it moves back, a job inside the repeated hour runs once. Both are recorded in the log with a dst note. If a job must run exactly N times a day regardless, schedule it in UTC.

Checking before you deploy

$ sundial check
backup    at 03:17 on mon,thu     next: Thu 03:17, Mon 03:17, Thu 03:17, Mon 03:17, Thu 03:17
report    at 06:00 (Europe/Berlin) next: Tue 06:00, Wed 06:00, Thu 06:00, Fri 06:00, Sat 06:00
prune     every 6h                 next: 14:22, 20:22, 02:22, 08:22, 14:22

3 jobs, 0 problems

check exits non-zero if anything fails to parse, which makes it a reasonable thing to run in CI against the config file.