Docs/Tutorials/Work that runs without you
Tutorials

Work that runs without you

8 min read

Some work does not need you present. Checking dependencies, sweeping issues, running a report first thing Monday - the kind of job you always mean to do and never quite do. DevThrottle can start an agent on a schedule and let it get on with it.

About ten minutes. You need a Gateway and at least one machine with a Director running, because a scheduled job has to have somewhere to run.

  1. Open Schedule and start a new job

    In the Cockpit, choose Schedule in the left rail, then New cron job. Give it a name you will recognise in a list months from now - the name is the only thing you will see when you come back wondering what this is.

  2. Choose where it runs

    Pick the machine under Run on, and give the repository path the session should open in. Both matter: a scheduled job is a real session on a real machine, not something that happens in the cloud.

    Warning
    If the machine list is empty, no Director has ever reported to this Gateway. The job cannot be created until one has - start DevThrottle on the machine you want the work to happen on, then come back.

  3. Say when

    Switch Schedule to Recurring and enter a five-field cron expression. 0 2 * * 1-5 means two in the morning, Monday to Friday.

    You do not have to trust yourself with that syntax. Underneath the box, the page reads your expression back in plain English - "At 2:00 AM, Monday through Friday". If that sentence is not what you meant, the expression is wrong. Set the time zone too, or the job will fire on a schedule that is not yours.

  4. Write the instruction as if you will not be there

    The prompt is what the agent wakes up to, and nobody will be around to clarify it. Say what to do, and say what to do when there is nothing to do - otherwise an agent with no work to report will invent some.

    Then choose whether it tells you when it finishes. Only on failure is the setting most people actually want; a nightly job that emails on success becomes noise you stop reading within a week.

  5. Create it, then run it once by hand

    Click Create job. It appears in the list with its target, its schedule in plain English, and when it will next fire.

    The Cockpit Schedule page listing one job called Nightly dependency sweep, targeting the machine SOREN_NORTH and the demo-app repository, scheduled at 2:00 AM Monday through Friday, next run in 3 hours, status enabled, with a Run now action
    The Cockpit Schedule page listing one job called Nightly dependency sweep, targeting the machine SOREN_NORTH and the demo-app repository, scheduled at 2:00 AM Monday through Friday, next run in 3 hours, status enabled, with a Run now action

    Now press Run now. Do not wait until two in the morning to find out that the path was wrong or the instruction was ambiguous. Watch that run finish, read what the agent did, and fix the prompt while you still remember what you meant.

Note
The schedule belongs to your Gateway, not to Windows Task Scheduler and not to the machine you created it from. You can create a job from your phone for a desktop that is asleep - though it will only run if that machine is actually awake when the time comes.
Tip
Start with one job, on a weekday schedule, that only notifies on failure. Scheduled work goes wrong quietly, and one job you trust is worth more than six you have stopped reading.

Next

For every field, the REST interface, exactly how firing works and where jobs are stored, see Scheduled runs. To create jobs from a script instead, see Driving DevThrottle from a script. To check what your overnight jobs actually did, see What did I actually get done this week?