You Shouldn't Have To Change Your Cron Schedules Every Six Months

Every six months, when the clocks change for Daylight Saving Time here in the United States, a Github Actions community discussion called "add timezone support to scheduling workflow runs with cron" receives renewed interest, and engineering teams either manually move their cron schedules forward or back an hour (again), or they attempt one of the many workarounds suggested in that discussion.

Time zones in cron schedules are natively supported in RWX run definitions, as seen in this basic example:

1
on:
2
cron:
3
  - key: deploy
4
    schedule: '30 9 ** * America/New_York' # daily at 09:30 Eastern Time

Under the hood, RWX uses multiple cron-parsing libraries, which means we can support quite a bit of flexibility with crons. To see more information about cron capabilities on RWX, such as leveraging event parameters and setting up conditional logic, check out our cron schedule docs.

In fact, our entire CI/CD product has been built in the time since the folks in the aforementioned Github Actions discussion have been waiting for time zone support. Learn more about our CI/CD platform, built on good ideas and a new runtime.