Triggers

What this page is for

The Triggers page is where you set up recurring automation. A trigger is a scheduled job: a cron expression paired with either a workflow or a runbook to execute. When the cron fires, Exolvra runs the linked automation and logs the result. Cheap, reliable, and hands-off.

Don’t use triggers for one-off work — that belongs in an issue. Use triggers for work that should happen on a cadence: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly.

Layout

The page lists every trigger with:

• Name and description
• Schedule — the cron expression, with a human-readable translation (“every day at 09:00 UTC”)
• Linked target — the workflow or runbook this trigger runs
• Status — Enabled, Disabled, or Paused
• Next fire — when the next scheduled execution will happen
• Last run — when the last one fired, and its outcome

Click any trigger to open its detail page with edit options and a history of past executions.

Common tasks

Create a new trigger

1. Click New trigger in the header
2. Pick a name and description
3. Enter a cron expression (standard 5-field format: minute hour day month weekday)
4. Pick the target — a workflow or a runbook from the dropdown
5. Optionally provide default input parameters for the target
6. Set the timezone (UTC by default)
7. Click Create

The trigger is enabled as soon as it’s created. It fires on the next cron match.

Cron syntax reference

The editor has a cron builder that lets you pick frequency from a dropdown if you don’t want to write the expression by hand.

Disable a trigger

Open the trigger detail page and click Disable. Disabled triggers keep their schedule and configuration but don’t fire. Re-enable from the same page when you want them running again.

Test a trigger

You don’t have to wait for the next scheduled fire. On the trigger detail page, click Run now. This executes the linked workflow or runbook immediately with the configured inputs. The manual run is logged separately so you can tell it apart from scheduled runs.

Monitor execution history

The History tab on the trigger detail page shows every past execution:

• Scheduled vs manual
• Start time, end time, duration
• Outcome — success, failed, or still running
• Link to the underlying workflow/runbook run detail

Use this to verify a trigger is firing as expected and to spot runs that started failing recently.

Delete a trigger

From the detail page, click Delete. The trigger is removed immediately — any in-flight runs continue to completion, but no new runs fire.

Parameters

Triggers can pass default input parameters to their linked workflow or runbook. This is how you parameterise a trigger:

• Workflow input: if the workflow has an input node declaring a topic parameter, the trigger can supply a value: “topic”: “weekly product update”
• Runbook parameters: if the runbook declares parameter placeholders, the trigger can fill them in

Parameters are evaluated per-trigger, not per-run. Two triggers can target the same workflow with different parameter values — a daily digest in English and a daily digest in Spanish, for example.

Common pitfalls

Cron in the wrong timezone. By default Exolvra uses UTC. If you want a trigger to fire at 09:00 in your local timezone, either adjust the cron expression to the UTC equivalent or explicitly set the trigger’s timezone on the edit page.

Overlapping runs. If a trigger is set to fire every hour but a run sometimes takes longer than an hour, you can end up with two runs racing each other. Either widen the schedule or enforce single-run semantics on the target runbook/workflow.

No error handling. Triggers fire on schedule regardless of whether anything is broken. A runbook that’s been failing every hour for two days will happily fail two more days unless you’re watching. Consider adding a cost alert or subscribing to failure notifications for critical triggers.

Where to go next

• Workflows — one of the two things a trigger can launch
• Runbooks — the other
• Workflows vs runbooks — picking between them