Scheduled GitHub Actions workflows never trigger, while manual runs work

[dominikskaro]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Schedule & Cron Jobs

Discussion Details

Hello,

I need help diagnosing scheduled workflows that never create runs in my public repository:

https://github.com/dominikskaro/tcg-tracker

What I have verified:
The repository’s default branch is main, and the workflow files are on that branch.
The repository does not appear to be a fork.
In Actions, both workflows show “Disable workflow” in the menu, so they appear to be enabled.
Manually running the TCG Tracker workflow with workflow_dispatch works.
The TCG Tracker schedule was tested first with Europe/Zagreb timezone support, then without a timezone using a UTC cron schedule. Neither produced scheduled runs.
I added an enabled Schedule Probe workflow using */5 * * * *. It only prints the event name and UTC time; it does not scrape websites or access secrets. It did not create a run after 15 minutes.
The scraper job uses runs-on: ubuntu-latest. No self-hosted runner is configured.

Because no scheduled run is created, there are no job logs or run IDs to inspect. Could you help determine why scheduled events are not being enqueued for this repository, or whether there is a repository/account setting preventing them?

I can provide screenshots of the workflow pages and a successful manual run if helpful.

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[Sagargupta16]

Nothing in the repo is misconfigured, and the file you have now is fine. GitHub is not creating schedule events for it, and only GitHub can fix that. Check it with one call and then leave the workflow file alone:

gh api "repos/dominikskaro/tcg-tracker/actions/runs?event=schedule" --jq .total_count

It returns 0 (I checked at 09:58 UTC), while the workflow is active. Zero means no run object was ever created, so there are no logs to look for. The strongest evidence is your first file: it sat untouched from 23:43 UTC yesterday to 08:11 UTC today, had windows at 05:05, 05:35 and every half hour to 08:05 Zagreb time (UTC+1 since the 25th), and none fired. The probe is weaker evidence than it looks: four windows in 19 minutes, around the top of the hour, which the schedule docs name as the time runs get delayed or dropped. Each push to the file also re-registers the schedule, so 08:42 and 09:12 came four minutes after a push. 09:42 was the first clean window and it did not fire either.

The timezone: key was not the cause. It is undocumented, but a public repo using timezone: Asia/Taipei gets its runs at 02:1x and 14:xx UTC, which is 10:00 and 22:00 Taipei, so it is honoured.

Same report this month, all private repos so far: #211322, #211326, #211258. Nobody found a config cause. Open a ticket at support.github.com with the workflow id (397662312) and the total_count: 0 output.

Until it clears, fire the workflow from an outside cron (a server, a Cloudflare Worker, cron-job.org) with a fine-grained token limited to this repo and Actions: Read and write:

curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  https://api.github.com/repos/dominikskaro/tcg-tracker/actions/workflows/397662312/dispatches \
  -d '{"ref":"main"}'