How to Set Up Cron Jobs and Automation in OpenClaw?

OpenClaw supports scheduled tasks (cron) that let your agent perform actions automatically without user input. Daily reports, monitoring, reminders, and automated workflows all run on schedule.

Cron jobs are configured in the OpenClaw config or through the cron-skill. You define a schedule (standard cron syntax), an action (natural language instruction or skill command), and optionally a target channel (which messenger/chat to send results to).

Example use cases: - Every morning at 9am: Check email and send a summary to Telegram - Every hour: Monitor competitor website for price changes - Every Friday at 5pm: Generate a weekly report from project data - Every night: Back up important files and notify via Discord

The heartbeat system monitors cron job execution. If a scheduled task fails, the agent can retry automatically or notify you about the failure.

Advanced automation: Combine cron jobs with webhooks to create event-driven workflows. For example, a webhook from GitHub triggers a code review, and a cron job posts daily code quality metrics.

Cron jobs share the same model and skills as interactive conversations. They consume API tokens, so budget accordingly for high-frequency schedules.

Tip: Start with one daily cron job (morning briefing). Add more as you discover routines worth automating.

# Add a cron job
openclaw cron add "0 9 * * *" "Check my email and summarize new messages"

# List cron jobs
openclaw cron list

# Remove a cron job
openclaw cron remove 1