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narnia-scheduler

Create, migrate, move, share, and manage Narnia-owned scheduled Copilot jobs.

The skill is the judgment layer over Narnia's scheduled-job and package tools. It designs self-contained prompts, inspects selected Windows tasks, resolves portability requirements, and coordinates a safe disabled-first handoff.

Capabilities

Flow Description
Create from scratch Design a prompt + cadence, call create_schedule, verify the task registered
Migrate an existing task Introspect a hand-made Windows Scheduled Task, translate its trigger to a Narnia cadence, and register an equivalent self-contained job
Export/share Narnia jobs Create a transfer package or sanitized share template
Package external tasks Reconstruct selected non-Narnia task behavior without adopting it locally
Import and hand off Resolve bindings, import disabled, dry-run, enable the destination, then disable the source
Supervised dry run Run a job's generation logic manually (optionally with secrets scrubbed from the environment) before trusting it on an unattended schedule

How It Works

Creating a job

  1. Design a self-contained prompt — one that resolves its own secrets (e.g. from a repo .env) rather than assuming any environment variable is pre-set, since the job runs as a plain copilot -p with no injected environment.
  2. Pick a cadence (daily / weekly / monthly) and call create_schedule.
  3. Verify with get_schedule — confirm taskFound: true and a sane nextRunTime.

Migrating an existing task

  1. Run the bundled Read-ExistingScheduledTask.ps1 script against the task's name/folder. It reads the task's exported XML (not the ScheduledTasks module's CIM .Triggers, which is unreliable for calendar triggers registered via raw XML) and returns a suggested Narnia cadence per trigger.
  2. Read the task's underlying script yourself to understand what it actually does.
  3. Design an equivalent self-contained prompt and call create_schedule.
  4. Disable (never delete) the original task once the new job is verified.

Supervised dry run

The bundled Invoke-NarniaDryRun.ps1 script runs a prompt via copilot -p from a given directory, optionally scrubbing environment variables matching a given prefix first — proving secret self-resolution actually works rather than relying on variables your interactive shell happens to already have set.

Moving or sharing jobs

Use export_schedule_package for existing Narnia jobs. Use the read-only Find-CopilotScheduledTasks.ps1 plus Read-ExistingScheduledTask.ps1 and build_schedule_package for selected external tasks.

On the destination, call preview_schedule_package until paths, task names, and dependencies are resolved, then call import_schedule_package. Imported jobs are registered disabled. Save the receipt, run a supervised test, enable the destination, and only then disable the original source task.

See Portable Scheduled Jobs.

Prerequisites

  • Windows (Task Scheduler). create_schedule/update_schedule support a register: false copy-paste mode on unsupported platforms.
  • The Narnia web server running (shared MCP endpoint) — see the narnia-web-server skill.

Usage Examples

Just ask the LLM naturally:

  • "Schedule a daily job at 5am that runs my example-radar skill"
  • "Migrate my hand-made 'Nightly Backup' scheduled task into Narnia"
  • "List my scheduled jobs and tell me if any are failing"
  • "Disable my example radar job for now"
  • "Export these schedules so I can move them to another computer"
  • "Package this existing Windows task without registering it in Narnia"
  • "Preview and import this .narnia-schedules.json file"
  • "Schedule my weekly report and explicitly deliver the Markdown with the narnia-report-email skill"

Design Principles

  • Narnia is a metadata registry + wrapper generator, not a scheduler. Windows Task Scheduler remains the executor.
  • One format. Every job is first-class and always editable — there is no separate "adopted" tier.
  • No pre-injected environment. A job's prompt/skill must self-resolve its own secrets.
  • Orchestration lives in the prompt, never in Narnia. Multi-step behavior is prompt text or a script colocated with the skill it belongs to.
  • Report delivery stays explicit. A prompt may invoke narnia-report-email after generation, but the scheduler never injects SMTP behavior.
  • Packages never contain secrets or generated machine artifacts.
  • Imports are disabled-first. Nothing runs until the destination is explicitly enabled.