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Run agents automatically on a schedule using agentuse serve. Configure schedules in agent frontmatter with cron expressions or intervals.

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Quick Start

  1. Add a schedule config to your agent:
  1. Start the server:
The server displays scheduled agents on startup:

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Schedule Formats

The schedule field accepts a single string value. The format is auto-detected:

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Intervals

Simple duration format for recurring tasks:
Supported units:
For daily or longer schedules, use cron expressions.

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Cron Expressions

Standard cron syntax for precise control:
Common patterns:
Use crontab.guru to build and validate cron expressions.

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Timezone

Cron expressions and intervals are evaluated in the local timezone of the machine running agentuse serve, not UTC. The times you write are literal wall-clock times for that server. Daylight saving transitions are handled automatically, so 0 9 * * 1-5 stays at 9am local across the year. To pin a schedule to a specific zone, run the server with TZ set (for example TZ=UTC agentuse serve or TZ=America/New_York agentuse serve).

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Example

A scheduled agent for daily reports:
Use cheaper models like openrouter:minimax/minimax-m3 for frequent, straightforward tasks (health checks, simple monitoring). Reserve claude-sonnet-4-6 and claude-opus-4-8 for complex creative tasks.

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Server Options

See CLI Commands - agentuse serve for all server options including port, host, and authentication configuration.

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Monitoring

The server logs each scheduled execution:
Enable debug mode for detailed logs:

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Scheduler Ownership and Recovery

Only one agentuse serve process arms schedules for a project. The daemon records that ownership in .agentuse/scheduler.lock; other daemons keep serving the project but skip its schedules to prevent duplicate side effects. Lock and filesystem errors fail closed: AgentUse skips schedules rather than risking two daemons running them. A stale daemon lock is reclaimed automatically. Reclamation itself uses the short-lived .agentuse/scheduler.lock.reclaim guard. If a process is killed during that critical section, the guard can be left behind and scheduling stays disabled. After confirming no daemon is currently reclaiming the lock, remove .agentuse/scheduler.lock.reclaim, then touch an agent file or restart agentuse serve. The warning prints the exact file path to remove.

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Next Steps

Webhooks

Trigger agents via HTTP

Self-Hosting

Deploy in production