Cron & Externally Triggered

How Cron and Externally Triggered Workflows differ from regular Pipe submissions.

Most Runs are created when you (or a teammate, or a Git event) submit a Workflow to Pipekit. Two other execution models bypass that path.

CronWorkflows

A CronWorkflow is an Argo construct that schedules a Workflow to run on a recurring cron expression. In Pipekit, a Pipe whose underlying YAML is a CronWorkflow behaves the same as any other Pipe, except submissions update the existing schedule on the cluster instead of creating a new Run. The Runs you see in the Pipe are produced by the Argo scheduler when the cron expression fires.

You can suspend, resume, trigger immediately, or delete CronWorkflows from the Pipekit UI, the Pipekit CLI, or by editing the YAML in Git. For task-oriented documentation, see Using Pipekit > Pipes > Cron.

Externally Triggered Workflows

An externally triggered Workflow is a Workflow that started outside of Pipekit. It is submitted directly to your cluster via kubectl, Argo CLI, Argo Events, Argo API, or any other path that bypasses Pipekit. Pipekit can be configured to discover these Workflows via the in-cluster informer and surface them in the same Pipes and Runs UI as Pipekit-submitted Workflows.

This is useful during migration to Pipekit, or for teams who want to keep an existing submission method but still get Pipekit's observability surface. The feature is opt-in and is enabled in the Pipekit Agent's Helm values.

For task-oriented documentation, see Using Pipekit > Pipes > Externally Triggered.