Schedules and runs

Schedules

The Jobs page lists everything on a timer. Each job carries its own next run on its line, and opening one reveals its frequency picker; underneath, Rows lists the rows that build on a schedule, grouped by the cron they share. Three rows on the same schedule are one trigger that builds all three, not three timers. That list is read-only: a row’s schedule is edited in the row editor, so each setting has exactly one home.

It lives with Jobs rather than in its own nav entry because “what background work exists” and “when does it run” are two views of one thing. As separate pages, every job was listed twice and neither page could answer a whole question. /schedule still redirects here.

Two jobs are worth knowing about there:

• Sync watch history reads only what changed since last night, then does a complete re-read weekly. Un-watch something you watched recently and the nightly read notices straight away; the weekly re-read is what catches an un-watch further back than that, and a title deleted from a library. If a library cannot be read incrementally, that library falls back to a complete read on its own rather than serving a stale watched set.
• Privacy sync runs nightly (05:15 by default). It re-merges every account’s share filter and builds, delivers and promotes nothing. So it can only ever make your server more private. It is the cheapest safety net against drift.
• Check and fix rows on Plex runs nightly at 05:45, after the rows build and after the privacy pass, so it checks the state those actually left behind. Drift is the failure nobody notices: a row left on the wrong shelf stays there until somebody happens to look, so the thing that repairs it is on by default. It is also the only schedule you can switch off completely, because it writes corrections to Plex, so its frequency picker offers Off where every other job offers Daily, and Off means off rather than “fall back to the default” the way every other blank cron does. Check now still works by hand with the schedule off.

Every row runs on its own schedule. There is no single server-wide one. Open a row (Rows → edit) and set its Schedule: Nightly or Weekly presets (just pick a run time), Custom for anything else, or Off to only run that row by hand. New rows default to nightly at 03:30 server-local; on upgrade, existing rows keep whatever your old global schedule was. Rows that share a cron run together. To skip a person entirely, pause them on their detail page.

Writing a custom schedule

Every Custom schedule box in Shortlist (a row’s schedule, and the watch-history, user-sync and backup pickers on Jobs) takes either form:

• Plain English: every 30 minutes, every 4 hours, every 4 hours at 17 past, hourly, nightly at 3:30am, daily at 21:15, mondays at 9pm, weekdays at 6am, weekends at 10am.
• A cron expression, if you already think that way: five fields: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week. 0 */6 * * * is every six hours; 0 4 * * 1 is Mondays at 4am.

Whichever you type, the line underneath tells you what it will actually do and what gets saved, and nothing saves until it parses. So a typo can’t quietly leave you on the built-in default. Times are the server’s, not your browser’s.