Support for recurring workflows

[gsxdsm]

Desired Behavior

Ability to schedule a workflow to run once at a particular time and date or recurring on a cron schedule.

[jamescmartinez]

agreed on both fronts.

run once at a particular time and date

brb, going to make a PR and ship an update. I didn't realize we didn't expose the timestamp in the new API.

recurring on a cron schedule

we don't have the cron scheduler built yet, but in the meantime, you can use a library like node-cron (or even GitHub Actions or AWS EventBridge) to trigger the workflow.

something like this:

import { CronJob } from "cron";
import { myWorkflow } from "./openworkflow/my-workflow";

CronJob.from({
  cronTime: "* * * * *", // every minute
  start: true, // run immediately
  onTick: async function () {
    await myWorkflow.run({ ... }); // start your workflow
  },
});

[jamescmartinez]

scheduling just shipped in openworkflow v0.6.4

• docs: https://openworkflow.dev/docs/workflows#scheduling-a-workflow-run
• PR: Schedule workflow runs with Date or duration string #248

[jamescmartinez]

going to keep this issue open, so I updated the issue title to reflect what's not yet implemented

[gsxdsm]

Thanks! Can't wait for built-in cron support!

[thomasjiangcy]

Just checking in to see if any help is required for the recurring piece! Would love to have this implemented.

[lecramr]

Same for me, too! If there is already a plan how to achieve the implementation, I'd love to contribute :)

[jamescmartinez]

Thanks for the bump @lecramr, and sorry @thomasjiangcy for missing your previous comment.

Schedules will be in the upcoming OpenWorkflow server. Cron really needs a coordinator and I don’t want to ship a version on raw SQLite/Postgres that makes workflow/other DB usage performance worse.

For now, I’d recommend an external cron (Node cron, GitHub actions, Vercel cron, k8s job, etc) -> hit your api -> ow.runWorkflow().