Automate Everything with Cron Scheduling in Hermes Agent

🟡 Intermediate⏱ 10 min read📅 2026-04-14👤 HermesAgent Community

Why Automate with Hermes?

You've been chatting with Hermes interactively. But what if Hermes could work for you while you sleep? With the built-in cron system, Hermes executes tasks on a schedule — no human input required.

Common automations:

📊 Daily reports — Summarize logs, metrics, or news every morning
🔍 Monitoring — Check server health and alert on issues
📧 Digests — Compile and send email newsletters
🔄 Sync tasks — Pull data from APIs and update databases
🧹 Maintenance — Clean up logs, rotate backups, update dependencies

Setting Up Your First Cron Task

Enable the Cron System

hermes config set cron.enabled true

Create a Simple Task

hermes cron add "Send me a daily weather summary for Tokyo" \ --schedule "0 8 *" \ --name daily-weather

✅ Cron task created! Name: daily-weather Schedule: 0 8 * (every day at 8:00 AM) Command: Send me a daily weather summary for Tokyo Next run: Tomorrow at 08:00

Cron Schedule Syntax

The schedule follows standard cron format:

┌───────── minute (0-59)
│ ┌─────── hour (0-23)
│ │ ┌───── day of month (1-31)
│ │ │ ┌─── month (1-12)
│ │ │ │ ┌─ day of week (0-6, Sun=0)
│ │ │ │ │
    *

| Expression | Meaning |

|-----------|---------|

| 0 9 * | Every day at 9:00 AM |

| /30 * | Every 30 minutes |

| 0 9 1-5 | Weekdays at 9:00 AM |

| 0 0 1 | First day of every month at midnight |

| 0 /6 | Every 6 hours |

| 0 9,18 * | At 9 AM and 6 PM daily |

Human-Readable Shortcuts

Hermes also accepts readable schedules:

hermes cron add "Check for security updates" --schedule "every 6 hours" --name security-check hermes cron add "Backup database" --schedule "daily at 3am" --name db-backup hermes cron add "Generate weekly report" --schedule "every monday at 9am" --name weekly-report

Managing Cron Tasks

List All Tasks

hermes cron list

Scheduled Tasks: ID Name Schedule Status Last Run Next Run 1 daily-weather 0 8 * ✅ Active Today 08:00 Tomorrow 08:00 2 security-check 0 /6 ✅ Active Today 12:00 Today 18:00 3 db-backup 0 3 * ⏸️ Paused Yesterday 03:00 — 4 weekly-report 0 9 1 ✅ Active Monday 09:00 Next Monday 09:00

Pause and Resume

hermes cron pause db-backup hermes cron resume db-backup

Edit a Task

hermes cron edit daily-weather --schedule "0 7 *" hermes cron edit daily-weather --command "Send weather summary for Tokyo and New York"

Delete a Task

hermes cron delete daily-weather

Run a Task Immediately

hermes cron run daily-weather

Real-World Automation Recipes

Recipe 1: Daily Development Digest

hermes cron add \ "Check my GitHub notifications, summarize new issues and PRs, \ and list any failed CI builds. Format as a brief morning digest." \ --schedule "0 8 1-5" \ --name dev-digest \ --notify telegram

Recipe 2: Server Health Check

hermes cron add \ "Check the status of these servers: \ - web: https://myapp.com/health \ - api: https://api.myapp.com/ping \ - db: run 'pg_isready' locally \ If any are down, alert me immediately." \ --schedule "/15 *" \ --name health-check \ --notify telegram \ --alert-only

The --alert-only flag means Hermes only sends a notification if something is wrong — no noise when everything is healthy.

Recipe 3: Dependency Update Monitor

hermes cron add \ "Run 'npm outdated' in ~/projects/my-app and tell me which \ packages have major version updates. Ignore patch versions." \ --schedule "0 10 1" \ --name dep-monitor

Recipe 4: Log Rotation & Analysis

hermes cron add \ "Analyze /var/log/nginx/access.log for the past 24 hours: \ - Top 10 most visited pages \ - Any 5xx errors and their causes \ - Unusual traffic patterns \ Then rotate the log file." \ --schedule "0 2 *" \ --name log-analysis

Recipe 5: Content Publisher

hermes cron add \ "Check ~/blog/drafts/ for any .md files with 'publish: true' \ in the frontmatter. For each one, build the page, deploy to \ production, and move the file to ~/blog/published/." \ --schedule "0 6 *" \ --name auto-publish

Notification Channels

Cron tasks can send results to any connected platform:

# Notify via Telegram hermes cron add "..." --notify telegram # Notify via Discord hermes cron add "..." --notify discord --notify-channel 1234567890 # Notify via Slack hermes cron add "..." --notify slack --notify-channel "#ops" # Notify via email hermes cron add "..." --notify email --notify-to "you@example.com" # Multiple channels hermes cron add "..." --notify telegram --notify slack

Cron Task Configuration

Full YAML Configuration

# ~/.hermes/cron/tasks.yaml tasks: - name: daily-weather schedule: "0 8 *" command: "Send me a daily weather summary for Tokyo" model: "openai/gpt-4o-mini" # Use a cheap model for simple tasks session: "cron-weather" # Dedicated session timeout: 60 # Max execution time (seconds) retries: 2 # Retry on failure notify: telegram: [123456789] enabled: true - name: health-check schedule: "/15 *" command: "Check server health..." model: "openai/gpt-4o-mini" timeout: 30 alert_only: true # Only notify on failures notify: telegram: [123456789] slack: ["#ops"] enabled: true

Viewing Logs

# View logs for a specific task hermes cron logs daily-weather # View logs for the last N runs hermes cron logs daily-weather --last 5 # View all cron logs hermes cron logs --all # Follow logs in real-time hermes cron logs --follow

Troubleshooting

Task not running

# Check if cron is enabled hermes config get cron.enabled # Verify the schedule hermes cron info daily-weather # Check for errors in the last run hermes cron logs daily-weather --last 1

Task taking too long

Set a reasonable timeout:

hermes cron edit slow-task --timeout 120

Cost management

Use cheap models for automated tasks:

hermes cron edit daily-weather --model openai/gpt-4o-mini

Next Steps

Build daily reports — Comprehensive reporting automation
Server monitoring — Production monitoring setup
Telegram bot setup — Receive cron alerts on your phone

Last updated: April 17, 2026 · Hermes Agent v0.8

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