Triggers & schedules

Triggers are how an agent acts when nobody is messaging it: on a schedule, or when an external system calls in. They fire from the platform, so they work even while the agent is asleep.

Why triggers exist

Maritime agents sleep when idle, and timers inside a sleeping agent do not fire. A cron library or setInterval running inside the process dies with the process. Triggers move the alarm clock outside the agent: the platform holds the schedule, wakes the agent (about a second), and delivers the event as a message. The schedule keeps its promises even when the agent does not exist between ticks.

Cron triggers

A cron trigger takes a standard five-field expression, wakes the agent on schedule, and delivers its prompt as a chat message on every fire. Three ways to create one:

• Ask the agent (OpenClaw-family and Hermes templates): tell it "send me a digest every weekday at 9" and the platform syncs the schedule it sets for itself into real wake triggers. These templates have no trigger editor in the dashboard; the agent is the editor.
• The dashboard editor (Claude Code, DeepSeek Harness, and custom containers): the agent page's trigger panel takes the cron expression; set the message to deliver via the API's config.prompt.
• The CLI, for any framework: maritime triggers create my-agent --type cron --cron "0 9 * * 1-5".

# five-field cron
0 9 * * 1-5     # weekdays at 09:00
*/15 * * * *    # every 15 minutes
0 0 1 * *       # first of the month, midnight

Coming from another provider? EventBridge's six-field cron(...), Azure's NCRONTAB with seconds, and rate(...) expressions all map onto five-field cron; the migration guides show the conversions per provider.

Webhook triggers

Every agent has a public invoke URL. A POST wakes the agent (if asleep) and delivers the payload as a message. No auth header is needed; treat the URL itself as the secret.

POST https://api.maritime.sh/api/webhooks/{agent_id}

Point CI failures, form submissions, or any external system at it and the agent decides what the event means. Channel messages (Telegram, Discord) wake agents the same way; see Channels & integrations.

Listing an agent's triggers

maritime triggers list my-agent   # cron / webhook / telegram / discord

Publishing schedules from a custom agent

An agent you wrote yourself (a custom container) can publish its own schedule instead of having you click triggers together in the dashboard. Either serve GET /schedules (Maritime polls while the agent is awake and registers real wake triggers), or push the list with one SDK line (observeScheduler / observe_scheduler). Maritime wakes the VM about 10 seconds before each occurrence; an entry that carries a prompt instead fires at the occurrence itself and has the prompt delivered to POST /chat with source "scheduled", even when the agent is already awake.

{"id": "morning", "cron": "35 9 * * *", "tz": "America/New_York",
 "prompt": "Send the morning summary", "enabled": true}

Details and the SDK helpers are in SDK: scheduled wakes.