Scheduling pipelines

Most examples of pipeline specifications demonstrate how to start a pipeline when new content is available. But there are other tasks to be done for a website. E.g., validate that external resources the website links to are still available, or retrieve data from external sources and add it to the content. Pipelines can be used for that as well.

Most of the pipeline specification is the same as for “regular” pipelines. The difference is that the pipeline is not triggered via a trigger but via:

schedules:
- cron: "30 2 * * Sat"
  branches:
    include:
    - ... branch name for the content...
  always: true

Some remarks:

• The cron property specifies when the pipeline should be run. In the example every Saturday at 2:30 UTC. As the name suggests the specification is the same as for the Unix cron command, which is described on many places on the internet.

• The always: true is required to execute the pipeline even if the content has not been changed since last time the pipeline has been run.