Daily Morning Brief Cron Job

Run a script every weekday at 7am — pull your calendar, weather, and top news into a digest.

What this schedule does

The expression 0 7 * * 1-5 fires at exactly 7:00 AM every Monday through Friday. The five fields mean: minute=0, hour=7, any day of month, any month, days 1–5 (Mon–Fri). It never runs on weekends.

This is the canonical "morning brief" schedule — run a script that aggregates information you need at the start of each work day: calendar events, weather forecast, unread emails, top news, Slack summaries, or overnight metric changes.

What to put in the script

A morning brief script typically calls several APIs and formats the output as an email, Slack message, or markdown file. Common data sources:

• Google Calendar API — today's meetings
• OpenWeatherMap API — local forecast
• Hacker News / RSS feed — top 5 tech stories
• Your analytics API — yesterday's key metrics
• GitHub — open PRs assigned to you

Pipe the output into mail, a Slack webhook, or write to a file that a dashboard reads.

Platform snippets

# crontab -e
0 7 * * 1-5    /path/to/morning-brief.sh

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 7 * * 1-5'   # UTC — adjust for your timezone

jobs:
  morning-brief:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Run morning brief
        run: python scripts/morning_brief.py
        env:
          SLACK_WEBHOOK: ${{ secrets.SLACK_WEBHOOK }}

# EventBridge cron (6 fields — adds year, UTC)
cron(0 7 ? * MON-FRI *)

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: morning-brief
spec:
  schedule: "0 7 * * 1-5"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: brief
            image: your-image:latest
            command: ["python", "morning_brief.py"]
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

Timezone note

Standard crontab uses the system timezone. GitHub Actions and AWS EventBridge run in UTC — if you're on US Eastern time (UTC-5), use 0 12 * * 1-5 to fire at 7am ET. Kubernetes 1.27+ supports spec.timeZone: "America/New_York".

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