Node Cron on virtual machine with shutdown schedule

Questions
1

Greetings,

I’m not getting the expected behavior of the Cron node in my wokflow.

I have a scenario where I want my workflow to be triggered, for example, every 5 days at 8:10AM. But my N8N instance runs in an azure virtual machine, which has schedulable startup and shutdown. Turning on every day at 07:00AM and turning off at 11:00AM, this is due to the need to contain costs in my company.

In this scenario, my cron node with cron expression “10 8 */5 * *”, is only triggering the workflow, everyday at 8:10AM, ignoring that it had already been fired in Last day.

I can’t keep the virtual machine turned on all the time. Doesn’t the cron node, or workflow, keep last run information to be able to guide trigger intervals?

Is the cron node the right one for my need?
Are there any other nodes or combinations of nodes that I can use to achieve my goal, even with my virtual machine turning on and off over the days?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Information on your n8n setup

  • n8n version: 0.153.0
  • Database you’re using (default: SQLite): SQLLite
  • Running n8n with the execution process [own(default), main]: own
  • Running n8n via [Docker, npm, n8n.cloud, desktop app]: azure virtual machine: Linux
2

Welcome to the community @Pedro.G

Can you please elaborate here? It’s running every day at 8:10 AM instead of every 5 days as you want to?

3

Yes that’s right.

I expected the trigger to fire every 5 days. But, when the virtual machine is turned on the next day, the workflow goes back to running at 8:10AM, ignoring that the day before it already ran, and ends up running every day at 8:10AM, not every 5 days.