Set up every trigger type Cotonity supports — webhook endpoints, cron schedules, manual runs, and how to combine multiple triggers on a single agent.
Webhook triggers
A webhook trigger gives your agent a unique HTTPS endpoint that any external system can POST data to. When Cotonity receives a request at that endpoint, it parses the payload and passes it as the agent's input. To configure a webhook trigger, open the Start node, select Webhook, and copy the generated URL. You can optionally require a shared secret (HMAC-SHA256) to verify that requests are coming from a trusted source — Cotonity will reject requests whose signatures do not match. The payload body, headers, and query parameters are all available as trigger outputs in downstream nodes.
Schedule triggers
A schedule trigger uses standard cron syntax to run your agent on a recurring basis — every hour, every weekday morning, the first of each month, or any other cadence. Enter the cron expression in the schedule field, or use the visual cron builder to click together a schedule without learning the syntax. Cotonity evaluates schedules in UTC by default; you can override this by selecting a timezone from the dropdown. Scheduled agents receive no external payload, so the agent's first real step is usually a data-fetch action that retrieves the records it needs to process.
Manual triggers
A manual trigger lets you run an agent on demand from the Cotonity dashboard, the CLI, or the REST API. This is useful for one-off tasks, ad-hoc data processing, or testing a new agent against a specific input without modifying its live trigger. From the dashboard, navigate to the agent's detail page and click Run Now; you will be prompted to supply any required input fields before the run starts. From the API, send a POST to `/v1/agents/{agentId}/runs` with a JSON body containing the input. Manual runs appear in the run history alongside scheduled and webhook-triggered runs.
Combining multiple triggers
An agent can have more than one trigger. For example, you might want the same lead-enrichment agent to fire both when a webhook arrives from your CRM and on a nightly schedule that processes any leads that were missed during the day. Add additional triggers by clicking Add Trigger in the Start node configuration panel. Each trigger type can have its own input schema, so downstream nodes need to use conditional expressions or a normalize step to handle the different input shapes gracefully. Cotonity labels each run in the history with the trigger that initiated it, making debugging easier.