Github Scheduled Tasks | Blog

At Electron Green, I was using AWS CDK to as the Infrastructure as Code tool. I gave my ECR assets a relatively short TTL to not waste storage, but this could mean that my bi-monthly ECS tasks could fail as the base image was gone. The good thing about CDK is that it will re-create images if they're not present, meaning that using Github's built-in scheduler was a free, painless way of keeping things in sync.

The Basics

Scheduled tasks use cron under the hood:

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 6 * * *' # every day at 6am UTC

Your full workflow might look like:

name: Daily Cleanup

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 6 * * *'

jobs:
  cleanup:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: echo "Clean things up here"

That’s it. GitHub wakes up daily, runs your task, and disappears.

Quick Notes

Cron is UTC. Adjust accordingly.
Test with workflow_dispatch to avoid waiting until tomorrow.
No persistent storage, so external state lives elsewhere.

For anything you'd normally script and forget, GitHub Scheduler is a clean, serverless solution. Just automation, done right.