User guide

Schedule workflows

Create a local cron schedule for a plan when the same workflow should run repeatedly with fixed invocation inputs.

Before you begin

Compile and test the plan once. Identify its required input values and choose a cron expression interpreted in local time.

Create a schedule

From the plan chat, run:

/schedule <plan> <cron> [--inputs '<json>']

For example:

/schedule daily-summary "0 8 * * *" --inputs '{"recipient":"team@example.com"}'

The captured inputs are validated when the schedule is created and reused each time it fires.

Understanding the cron expression

A cron expression has five parts, in this order:

minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week

For example, 0 8 * * MON-FRI means “at 8:00 a.m. every Monday through Friday.” The * means “every,” and ranges select a span of values. Numeric weekdays in INXM start at Sunday = 1, so 1-5 means Sunday through Thursday. Schedule times use your computer's local time zone.

Manage schedules

Use /schedules in any chat to list schedules. The Plans view provides controls for schedule state; the MCP API also exposes list_schedules, delete_schedule, and set_schedule_enabled.

Keep schedules running

Schedules run only while an INXM Local scheduler is running. Choose how you want to keep it running:

  • Use the desktop app: Leave Keep schedules running in the background enabled in Settings (it is on by default). Closing the window hides INXM Local in the system tray; it does not quit the app. From the tray menu, you can reopen the window, pause or resume all schedules, or quit INXM Local. Pausing does not change each schedule's enabled state.
    • When started from the desktop app, scheduled runs get no credentials from your shell profile.
  • Run without the desktop app: Keep this command running in a terminal or managed process: inxm-local --headless or INXM_HEADLESS=1 inxm-local
    • When started from a terminal, scheduled runs get everything in that terminal, including credentials, e.g., OPENAI_API_KEY.

Give each scheduled tool the tokens or API keys it needs in its Env or Server env field. See Tool environment for more details.

Only one INXM Local instance can run schedules for a data directory at a time. If no scheduler is running when a scheduled time passes, that occurrence is skipped; it will not run later as a catch-up.

What's next

Edit this page