Cron Retry Skill

Automatically detect and retry cron jobs that failed due to network/connection errors.

Quick Start (Heartbeat Integration)

Add this to your HEARTBEAT.md:

## Cron Recovery Check
Check for cron jobs with lastStatus: "error". If the error matches network patterns (connection error, sendMessage failed, fetch failed, ETIMEDOUT, ECONNREFUSED), retry the job using cron tool with action: "run" and the job ID. Report what was recovered.

That's it. On each heartbeat, failed network jobs get retried automatically.

How It Works

On heartbeat, check all cron jobs via cron list

Filter for jobs where lastStatus = "error" and enabled = true

Check if lastError matches network-related patterns

Re-run eligible jobs via cron run

Report results

Network Error Patterns (Retryable)

These errors indicate transient network issues worth retrying:

• Network request.*failed
• Connection error
• ECONNREFUSED
• ETIMEDOUT
• ENOTFOUND
• sendMessage.*failed
• fetch failed
• socket hang up

What Gets Retried vs Skipped

Retried:

• Network timeouts


• Connection refused


• Message send failures


• DNS lookup failures

Skipped (not retried):

• Logic errors (bad config, missing data)


• Auth failures


• Disabled jobs


• Jobs that just ran successfully

Manual Recovery Check

To check and retry failed jobs manually:

# List all jobs and their status
clawdbot cron list

# Find failed jobs
clawdbot cron list | jq '.jobs[] | select(.state.lastStatus == "error") | {name, error: .state.lastError}'

# Retry a specific job
clawdbot cron run --id <JOB_ID>

Agent Implementation

When implementing the heartbeat check:

1. Call cron tool with action: "list"
2. For each job in response.jobs:
   - Skip if job.enabled !== true
   - Skip if job.state.lastStatus !== "error"
   - Check if job.state.lastError matches network patterns
   - If retryable: call cron tool with action: "run", jobId: job.id
3. Report: "Recovered X jobs" or "No failed jobs to recover"

Example Scenario

7:00 PM — Evening briefing cron fires

Network hiccup — Telegram send fails

Job marked lastStatus: "error", lastError: "Network request for 'sendMessage' failed!"

7:15 PM — Connection restored, heartbeat runs

Skill detects the failed job, sees it's a network error

Retries the job → briefing delivered

Reports: "Recovered 1 job: evening-wrap-briefing"

Safety

• Only retries transient network errors
• Respects job enabled state
• Won't create retry loops (checks lastRunAtMs)
• Reports all recovery attempts