Per-User Morning Briefing on Trigger.dev

What It Does

This recipe builds the scheduling backbone for a personal-assistant product where every user gets a morning briefing at their own local time. Instead of one global cron, you define a single Trigger.dev scheduled task and attach a per-user imperative schedule keyed by externalId (the user id) and their timezone. When a user’s schedule fires, the task loads that user, gathers their day (calendar events, due tasks, weather), summarizes it with an LLM, and sends it. Trigger.dev handles retries, queues, observability, and elastic scaling, so a single task can back thousands of users.

The Stack

• Trigger.dev Scheduled Tasks — schedules.task() defines the briefing job; schedules.create() attaches one schedule per user with cron: "0 7 * * *", the user’s timezone, an externalId, and a deduplicationKey so you never double-schedule a user.
• TypeScript — the briefing task lives in your /trigger folder; the payload carries timestamp, timezone, and externalId.
• An LLM — summarize each user’s day with a free/BYOK model such as GitHub Models.
• Data sources — your app DB plus the user’s calendar/tasks, fetched inside the run by externalId.

Step-by-Step Outline

1. Define the task — schedules.task({ id: "morning-briefing", run }); inside run, read payload.externalId and load that user.
2. Assemble the briefing — fetch the user’s calendar, tasks, and any extras, then summarize with the LLM.
3. Deliver — send the briefing (email / push / Telegram) to that user.
4. Onboard schedules — when a user signs up, call schedules.create({ task, cron, timezone, externalId, deduplicationKey }) so each user runs at 7am local.
5. Manage — use schedules.deactivate / activate / del to pause or remove a user’s briefing without redeploying.

Source

Trigger.dev docs — Scheduled tasks (cron), including dynamic per-user schedules via externalId