Workspace Scheduling

Scheduling helps minimize cloud costs without sacrificing the availability of your workspaces.

You can configure each workspace to automatically start in the morning, and automatically stop once you log off. Coder also features an inactivity timeout, configured by your template admin, which will stop a workspace when a user's absence is detected.

To learn more workspace states and schedule, read the workspace lifecycle documentation.

Where to find the schedule settings

Click on any workspace the Workspaces tab of the dashboard, then go to Workspace settings in the top right.

Then open the Schedule tab to see your workspace scheduling options.

Autostart

Autostart must be enabled in the template settings by your administrator.

Use autostart to start a workspace at a specified time and which days of the week. Also, you can choose your preferred timezone. Admins may restrict which days of the week your workspace is allowed to autostart.

Autostop

Use autostop to stop a workspace after a number of hours. Autostop won't stop a workspace if you're still using it. It will wait for the user to become inactive before checking connections again (1 hour by default). Template admins can modify the inactivity timeout duration with the inactivity bump template setting. Coder checks for active connections in the IDE, SSH, Port Forwarding, and coder_app.

Inactivity timeout

Workspaces will automatically shut down after a period of inactivity. This can be configured at the template level, but is visible in the autostop description for your workspace.

Autostop requirement

Enterprise

Premium

Enterprise template admins may enforce a required stop for workspaces to apply updates or undergo maintenance. These stops ignore any active connections or inactivity bumps. Rather than being specified with a CRON, admins set a frequency for updates, either in days or weeks. Workspaces will apply the template autostop requirement on the given day in the user's timezone and specified quiet hours (see below).

Admins: See the template schedule settings for more information on configuring Autostop Requirement.

User quiet hours

Enterprise

Premium

User quiet hours can be configured in the user's schedule settings page. Workspaces on templates with an autostop requirement will only be forcibly stopped due to the policy at the start of the user's quiet hours.

Scheduling configuration examples

The combination of autostart, autostop, and the inactivity timer create a powerful system for scheduling your workspace. However, synchronizing all of them simultaneously can be somewhat challenging, here are a few example configurations to better understand how they interact.

Note that the inactivity timer must be configured by your template admin.

Working hours

The intended configuration for autostop is to combine it with autostart, and set a "working schedule" for your workspace. It's pretty intuitive:

If I want to use my workspace from 9 to 5 on weekdays, I would set my autostart to 9:00 AM every day with an autostop of 9 hours. My workspace will always be available during these hours, regardless of how long I spend away from my laptop. If I end up working overtime and log off at 6:00 PM, the inactivity timer will kick in, postponing the shutdown until 7:00 PM.

Basing solely on inactivity

If you'd like to ignore the TTL from autostop and have your workspace solely function on inactivity, you can set your autostop equal to inactivity timeout.

Let's say that both are set to 5 hours. When either your workspace autostarts or you sign in, you will have confidence that the only condition for shutdown is 5 hours of inactivity.

Dormancy

Enterprise

Premium

Dormancy automatically deletes workspaces which remain unused for long durations. Template admins configure an inactivity period after which your workspaces will gain a dormant badge. A separate period determines how long workspaces will remain in the dormant state before automatic deletion.

Enterprise admins may also configure failure cleanup, which will automatically delete workspaces that remain in a failed state for too long.