--- title: Scheduling a recipe --- # Scheduling a recipe ## What it is A recipe is a saved multi-step Claude workflow you would otherwise start by hand. **Scheduling** it means Omniscio starts it for you on a repeating calendar — every couple of hours, every weekday morning, on the first of the month — without you opening the app. Because a recipe run starts real Claude work, **every fire costs money**. That is why the form defaults to a sensible, conservative schedule rather than to "as often as possible", and why it is worth reading the controls rather than accepting them. ## Where to find it - **From the recipe editor** — the **Schedule Recipe** button in the Recipe Editor opens the **Schedule Recipe** dialog. On a recipe that already has a schedule, the same button reads **Edit Schedule** and reopens it. - **The dialog itself** — a **Frequency** row of four buttons, then the controls that frequency needs, a **Next run** preview underneath, and **Cancel** / (**Schedule** or **Update**) at the foot. A **Remove** action sits alongside for deleting the schedule, and once a schedule exists the dialog header carries an **Active / Paused** toggle. See [Use recipes](use-recipes.md) for what a recipe is and how to run one by hand. ## How it behaves ### Choosing a frequency Four buttons: **Interval**, **Daily**, **Weekly**, **Monthly**. The choice changes which controls appear below it. - **Interval** — run every so many minutes or hours, with no fixed time of day. You get a row of **quick-select** buttons — **30m, 1h, 2h, 4h, 8h, 12h** — and a **Custom** box that takes a number of minutes. **Custom will not go below 15 minutes.** This is the frequency to use for "keep an eye on things", and the reason for the floor is straightforward: at anything faster the run costs more than the thing it is watching. - **Daily** — once a day, at a **Time** you pick. - **Weekly** — once a week at a **Time** you pick, on **the days you tick** — seven toggles, one per weekday, so "weekdays only" is Mon–Fri ticked and the weekend left off. - **Monthly** — once a month at a **Time**, on the **day of the month** you pick. The picker offers **1 to 28 only**: the last days of the month vary in length, and clamping to 28 means a monthly schedule never silently skips a month because it was pointed at the 31st. ### Checking what you set Below the frequency controls, a **Next run** line tells you exactly when this will next fire, so a misread frequency shows up before you save rather than after. **Schedule** creates it; **Update** saves a change to an existing one. ### Afterwards - **The header toggle** pauses and resumes the schedule without deleting it — the right move when you want the recipe to stay configured but stop running, rather than losing the setup. - **Remove** deletes the schedule. The recipe itself is untouched. - **Because the run is a real Claude session, a scheduled recipe shows up in your inbox like any other run** — its approval gates still apply, and a step waiting on your approval still waits for it (see [Use recipes](use-recipes.md) for the approval-timeout behaviour). The defaults a brand-new schedule is seeded with are deliberate, not arbitrary: **5pm local, every 2 hours, weekdays**. If you accept them and press Schedule, that is what you get. ### Recipe schedules and cron jobs These are two different mechanisms, and it is easy to reach for the wrong one: - A **recipe schedule** lives with the recipe. It is the simplest way to put one recipe on a calendar, and it is what this dialog creates. - A **cron job** is the general scheduler — it can run a script, start a session, *or* run a recipe, and it carries the extra switches a job can have (approval before every run, self-healing, run-if-missed, per-job environment variables, and chaining after another job). Use a cron job when you want those; see [Cron jobs](cron-jobs.md). ## For agents - The dialog is `src/renderer/src/features/recipes/RecipeScheduleDialog.tsx`. Constants worth knowing before reading or writing a schedule: `INTERVAL_PRESETS` (30m/1h/2h/4h/8h/12h), `INTERVAL_MIN_MINUTES = 15`, the monthly day picker built from `Array.from({ length: 28 })`, and the new-schedule seed of 5pm local / every 2 hours / weekdays. - Pointing a **cron job** at a recipe instead is the `cron-recipe-executor` path; the recipe itself is then run by the cron engine, not by this schedule. ## Related - [Use recipes](use-recipes.md) — what a recipe is, running one by hand, and the approval gates a scheduled run still goes through. - [Cron jobs](cron-jobs.md) — the general scheduler, including running a recipe as a job type. - [Create a cron job with AI](create-cron-job-with-ai.md) — describing a schedule in plain language and letting an AI create it. - [Recipes via CLI](recipes-cli-authoring.md) — authoring and inspecting recipes from an outside AI.