Cron triggers - Buttons

A cron trigger fires a button press on a recurring schedule. It lives on the button’s spec and runs under the buttons serve trigger engine.

buttons trigger add daily-snapshot --cron --schedule "0 3 * * *"
buttons trigger add slack-sync --cron --schedule "0 */2 * * *"

Schedules are standard 5-field cron expressions (parsed with cron.ParseStandard). Cron attaches to a button only — drawers support webhook triggers, not cron (the cron drawer kind is reserved but not implemented).

Passing args

Pass --arg KEY=VALUE (repeatable) to set the args the press runs with each tick:

buttons trigger add report --cron --schedule "0 9 * * 1" --arg window=weekly

buttons trigger add requires exactly one kind flag: --cron, --watch, or --webhook. The trigger id is generated automatically (a short hex id) — there is no --name, --timezone, or --overlap flag.

Management

buttons trigger list             # every trigger, across all buttons
buttons trigger list <button>    # just this button's triggers
buttons trigger rm <button> <trigger-id>

There is no show, pause, or resume — to stop a schedule, remove the trigger with buttons trigger rm (the id comes from buttons trigger list).

How it fires

A cron schedule is inert without a process watching it. The engine that fires triggers runs in-process inside buttons serve (the local REST API server), not a separate daemon:

On startup, buttons serve collects every button’s triggers. The cron scheduler starts only if at least one cron trigger exists.
Each scheduled fire presses the target button with the trigger’s configured args and records a normal run in the button’s history.
Run buttons serve --no-triggers to start the API without the trigger engine.

Cron triggers fire only while buttons serve is running — keep it up (or under a process supervisor) for schedules to tick.

​Passing args

​Management

​How it fires

Passing args

Management

How it fires