In any business, the hum of daily operations is often punctuated by the quiet, repetitive tasks that someone, somewhere, has to remember to do. Generating daily reports, syncing data between services, running maintenance scripts, or sending out weekly summaries—these recurring jobs are the lifeblood of an organized system. For decades, the go-to tool for this kind of automation has been the venerable cron job.
But as our applications become more complex, distributed, and cloud-native, is a simple cron tab still the right tool for the job? Managing, monitoring, and scaling cron jobs across different environments can introduce fragility and operational overhead.
What if you could schedule your workflows with the same reliability and observability as the rest of your event-driven architecture? With trigger.do, time itself becomes just another event you can subscribe to. Let's explore how time-based triggers are modernizing scheduled tasks, moving them from brittle scripts to resilient, code-first workflows.
Cron is powerful, but its simplicity hides several challenges that become apparent at scale:
Instead of thinking of a scheduled task as an external process that calls your code, trigger.do flips the model. A scheduled event is a first-class trigger that initiates a workflow defined within your application's logic.
This is the core of our "Business-as-Code" philosophy. Your recurring business processes are defined, versioned, and managed right alongside the rest of your application code.
Here’s why this is a game-changer:
You can trigger any workflow you've defined on a schedule. The possibilities are endless, but here are a few common examples:
With trigger.do, you define your workflow using our SDK and then attach a schedule to it—it's that simple. While you can trigger any workflow via an API call, you can also set it to run on a recurring basis using a cron expression.
Let's imagine you want to send a daily sales report.
First, you define the workflow that contains the business logic. This workflow could fetch data, format a report, and send an email.
// in your trigger.do setup file (e.g., jobs/index.ts)
import { Do } from '@do-sdk/client';
import { getSalesDataForYesterday, generateReport, emailService } from '../lib';
const client = new Do({ apiKey: process.env.DO_API_KEY });
// 1. Define the workflow logic
client.defineWorkflow('send-daily-report', async (payload) => {
console.log('Fetching sales data...');
const salesData = await getSalesDataForYesterday();
console.log('Generating report...');
const report = generateReport(salesData);
console.log('Emailing report to sales team...');
await emailService.send({
to: 'sales@example.com',
subject: `Daily Sales Report for ${new Date().toLocaleDateString()}`,
body: report,
});
return { success: true, reportSize: report.length };
});
Next, you schedule this workflow. You can do this directly from your trigger.do dashboard or define it declaratively in your project configuration. You simply specify the workflow ID and the cron schedule.
Example Schedule Configuration:
That's it. The trigger.do platform now ensures that your send-daily-report workflow is executed reliably every weekday morning, with the full power of logging, retries, and monitoring behind it.
Time-based triggers transform automation from a chore into a strategic advantage. By treating scheduled tasks as first-class, code-defined workflows, you gain unprecedented reliability and observability while eliminating brittle infrastructure dependencies.
Move beyond cron and embrace a modern, resilient approach to automating your recurring tasks.
Ready to put your recurring tasks on autopilot? Sign up for trigger.do and schedule your first workflow in minutes.