TIL: GitHub Actions on cron Job Might Be Late

Today I learned that scheduled GitHub Actions might be late or not run at all. 😠

I’ve written a script which fetches my blog posts every week on Monday and creates a draft with my newsletter provider.

The script uses a cron job.

I assumed that the cron job will run at the specified time.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case as per this post in the GitHub support forums:

Many times, there is a delay when triggering the scheduled workflow.
Generally the delay time is about 3 to 10 minutes. Sometimes it may be more time, even dozens of minutes or more than one hour. However, if the delay time is too long, the scheduled workflow may be not triggered at that day.

A possible work-around is using a third-party service like IFTTT to trigger the GitHub Action Workflow.