In Salt versions greater than 0.12.0, the scheduling system allows incremental executions on minions or the master. The schedule system exposes the execution of any execution function on minions or any runner on the master.

Scheduling is enabled via the schedule option on either the master or minion config files, or via a minion's pillar data. Schedules that are impletemented via pillar data, only need to refresh the minion's pillar data, for example by using saltutil.refresh_pillar. Schedules implemented in the master or minion config have to restart the application in order for the schedule to be implemented.

A scheduled run has no output on the minion unless the config is set to info level or higher. Refer to minion logging settings.

Specify maxrunning to ensure that there are no more than N copies of a particular routine running. Use this for jobs that may be long-running and could step on each other or otherwise double execute. The default for maxrunning is 1.

States are executed on the minion, as all states are. You can pass positional arguments and provide a yaml dict of named arguments.

The below example will schedule the command state.apply httpd test=True every 3600 seconds (every hour):

schedule:
  job1:
    function: state.apply
    seconds: 3600
    args:
      - httpd
    kwargs:
      test: True

This next example will schedule the command state.apply httpd test=True every 3600 seconds (every hour) splaying the time between 0 and 15 seconds:

schedule:
  job1:
    function: state.apply
    seconds: 3600
    args:
      - httpd
    kwargs:
      test: True
    splay: 15

Finally, the next example will schedule the command state.apply httpd test=True every 3600 seconds (every hour) splaying the time between 10 and 15 seconds:

schedule:
  job1:
    function: state.apply
    seconds: 3600
    args:
      - httpd
    kwargs:
      test: True
    splay:
      start: 10
      end: 15

Frequency of jobs can also be specified using date strings supported by the python dateutil library. This requires python-dateutil to be installed on the minion.

For example, this will schedule the command state.apply httpd test=True at 5:00pm localtime on the minion.

schedule:
  job1:
    function: state.apply
    args:
      - httpd
    kwargs:
      test: True
    when: 5:00pm

To schedule the command state.apply httpd test=True at 5pm on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and 3pm on Tuesday and Thursday, use the following:

schedule:
  job1:
    function: state.apply
    args:
      - httpd
    kwargs:
      test: True
    when:
        - Monday 5:00pm
        - Tuesday 3:00pm
        - Wednesday 5:00pm
        - Thursday 3:00pm
        - Friday 5:00pm

Time ranges are also supported. For example, the below configuration will schedule the command state.apply httpd test=True every 3600 seconds (every hour) between the hours of 8am and 5pm. The range parameter must be a dictionary with the date strings using the dateutil format.

schedule:
  job1:
    function: state.apply
    seconds: 3600
    args:
      - httpd
    kwargs:
      test: True
    range:
        start: 8:00am
        end: 5:00pm

The scheduler also supports ensuring that there are no more than N copies of a particular routine running. Use this for jobs that may be long-running and could step on each other or pile up in case of infrastructure outage.

The default for maxrunning is 1.

schedule:
  long_running_job:
      function: big_file_transfer
      jid_include: True

schedule:
  job1:
    function: state.sls
    seconds: 3600
    run_on_start: False
    args:
      - httpd
    kwargs:
      test: True

schedule:
  log-loadavg:
    function: cmd.run
    seconds: 3660
    args:
      - 'logger -t salt < /proc/loadavg'
    kwargs:
      stateful: False
      shell: \bin\sh

schedule:
  highstate:
    function: state.apply
    minutes: 60

schedule:
  run_my_orch:
    function: state.orchestrate
    hours: 6
    splay: 600
    args:
      - orchestration.my_orch

schedule:
  uptime:
    function: status.uptime
    seconds: 60
    returner: mysql
  meminfo:
    function: status.meminfo
    minutes: 5
    returner: mysql