Smart Cron — Natural Language Cron Scheduler for OpenClaw

Smart Cron — Natural Language Cron Scheduler for OpenClaw

Schedule any OpenClaw task using plain English. No cron syntax required. Just say what you want, when you want it.

What It Does

• Natural language scheduling — "every weekday at 9am", "every 30 minutes", "first Monday of month"
• Full cron job lifecycle — add, list, remove, pause, resume
• Timezone-aware — schedule in any timezone (UTC, Europe/Bucharest, etc.)
• Failure alerts — WhatsApp/Telegram alert if a job fails
• Next run preview — shows exactly when each job runs next
• Run logs — persisted history of every execution
• Zero external dependencies — uses system cron + OpenClaw orchestration

Quick Start

# Add a daily digest job
smart-cron add "every weekday at 9am" --task "summarize my emails"

# Add an interval job
smart-cron add "every 30 minutes" --task "check server health"

# Monthly job
smart-cron add "first Monday of month at 10am" --task "generate monthly report"

# List all scheduled jobs
smart-cron list

# Show next run times
smart-cron next

# View job logs
smart-cron logs

# Pause a job (without deleting it)
smart-cron pause <job-id>

# Resume paused job
smart-cron resume <job-id>

# Remove a job
smart-cron remove <job-id>

Commands

Supported Schedule Expressions

Intervals

• every 5 minutes → */5 * * * *
• every hour → 0 * * * *
• every 2 hours → 0 */2 * * *
• every 30 minutes → */30 * * * *

Daily

• every day at 9am → 0 9 * * *
• every weekday at 9am → 0 9 * * 1-5
• every weekend at noon → 0 12 * * 6,0
• daily at midnight → 0 0 * * *

Weekly

• every Monday at 8am → 0 8 * * 1
• every Friday at 5pm → 0 17 * * 5

Monthly

• first Monday of month → calculated and re-scheduled
• 1st of month at 9am → 0 9 1 * *
• last day of month → calculated dynamically

Custom cron (passthrough)

• 0 */6 * * * → runs as-is for advanced users

Timezone Support

# Schedule in your local timezone
smart-cron add "every weekday at 9am" \
  --task "daily standup reminder" \
  --timezone Europe/Bucharest

# List shows times in both UTC and local tz

Failure Alerts

When a scheduled task fails, Smart Cron sends an alert via your configured channel:

⚠️ Smart Cron: "daily standup reminder" FAILED
Time: 09:00 EET (07:00 UTC)
Error: Task timed out after 300s
Last success: yesterday at 09:00
Logs: smart-cron logs job-123

Data Storage

All job configs and logs stored locally at ~/.openclaw/workspace/smart-cron-data/. SQLite, no telemetry.

Configuration

Edit ~/.openclaw/workspace/smart-cron-data/config.json:

{
  "default_timezone": "Europe/Bucharest",
  "alert_channel": "whatsapp",
  "alert_on_failure": true,
  "log_retention_days": 30
}

Use Cases

Morning Briefing

smart-cron add "every weekday at 8am" --task "summarize overnight emails and news"

Uptime Monitoring

smart-cron add "every 5 minutes" --task "check all APIs and alert if any is down"

Weekly Reports

smart-cron add "every Friday at 5pm" --task "generate weekly work summary and log to MEMORY.md"

Monthly Cleanup

smart-cron add "1st of month at 2am" --task "clean old logs and archive memory files older than 90 days"

Requirements

• OpenClaw 1.0+
• Python 3.8+ (for schedule parsing)
• cron daemon (standard on Linux/macOS)

Source & Issues

• Source: https://github.com/mariusfit/smart-cron
• Issues: https://github.com/mariusfit/smart-cron/issues
• Author: @mariusfit