Tutorial: Scheduled Pipeline

In this tutorial you will build a nightly pipeline that runs dependency audits and sends a Slack notification with the results.

Time: ~10 minutes Export target: GitHub Actions

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What you'll build

A pipeline that runs every night at 2:00 AM and:

1. Checks for outdated dependencies
2. Runs a security audit
3. Notifies a Slack channel with the result

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Step 1 — Save the Slack webhook

1. Go to Settings → Credentials → New Credential
2. Fill in:
   • Label: Slack Webhook — #alerts
   • Provider: slack
   • Value: https://hooks.slack.com/services/... (your Slack incoming webhook URL)
3. Save

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Step 2 — Create the pipeline

Open your project, click New Pipeline → name it nightly-audit.

Step 3 — Configure the trigger

Click Trigger:

• Type: Schedule
• Cron: 0 2 * * * (every day at 2:00 AM UTC)

Step 4 — Add the Audit stage

Add a stage named Audit.

Double-click to enter it. Add a job:

• Name: dependency-audit
• Runs on: ubuntu-latest

Add steps:

Step 1 — Checkout

• Type: git / Operation: checkout

Step 2 — Install dependencies

• Type: shell_command
• Script: npm ci

Step 3 — Check for outdated packages

• Type: shell_command
• Script:

  npm outdated || true

• Label: Check outdated packages

(The || true prevents the job from failing if there are outdated packages — we want to report, not block.)

Step 4 — Security audit

• Type: shell_command
• Script:

  npm audit --audit-level=high

• Label: Security audit

Step 5 — Notify Slack

• Type: notification
• Channel: slack
• Credential: Slack Webhook — #alerts
• Message: ✅ Nightly audit completed for my-app

TIP

To send different messages on success vs. failure, add two notification steps: one with Continue on error enabled on the audit step, and conditionals in the YAML. This is easier to set up directly in the YAML after exporting.

Step 5 — Save and export

Click Save then Export → GitHub Actions → Download.

Commit nightly-audit.yml to .github/workflows/.

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Result

The pipeline will run every night at 2:00 AM. If the security audit finds high-severity vulnerabilities, the job will fail and GitHub will send you an email notification. Either way, Slack receives a message.

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Adjusting the schedule

To change the frequency, update the trigger in pipel8ne and re-export:

Goal	Cron
Every Monday at 9 AM	0 9 * * 1
Every 6 hours	0 */6 * * *
First of each month	0 0 1 * *
Weekdays at 8 AM	0 8 * * 1-5