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Skill

cron-and-intervals

@val-town Updated 2026-10-13

Use when building a val that runs on a schedule — periodic jobs, recurring tasks, polling, cron jobs, monitoring, alerting. Covers the interval handler signature, cron expressions, the UTC timezone constraint, and the `lastRunAt` pattern for detecting new items since the previous run.

Install

With your agent

Install OMGSkills skill "val-town/plugins:plugin/skills/cron-and-intervals" into this agent's normal skills directory: call the OMGSkills MCP get_install_plan tool for your agent and run the script it returns (it installs only the pinned commit and verifies SKILL.md), and stop if MCP or the pin is unavailable. Do not overwrite or change existing skills without asking me.

Manual command

git clone https://github.com/val-town/plugins /tmp/plugins && ln -s /tmp/plugins/plugin/skills/cron-and-intervals ~/.claude/skills/cron-and-intervals

From README

Cron / Interval Vals Interval vals (fileType: "interval") run on a recurring schedule defined by a cron expression. Use them for polling external APIs, sending reminders, running cleanups, generating reports, or any work that should happen on a clock rather than in response to a request. Basic handler The file must have an export — export default for the handler. Timezone Cron expressions run in UTC. Convert any human-readable schedule (e.g. "9am Eastern") to UTC before writing the cron expression. Daylight savings is not handled — pick a UTC time that's close enough year-round. The lastRunAt pattern interval.lastRunAt is the timestamp of the previous successful run (or undefined on the first run). Use it to fetch only items created since the last run, instead of re-scanning everything: This makes the val idempotent against missed runs and avoids reprocessing.