Schedules (job header button) starts a job on its own, on a recurring day/time pattern -- a named weekday, weekday/weekend, a day-of-month, first/last of month or year, or a plain daily window, each with how often to repeat inside it and what to do if a run overruns or the window gets missed entirely. A job can also be marked to fire once, every time the Worker service (re)starts, on its own or alongside a real schedule -- useful for catching up on whatever a restart's downtime otherwise would have missed.

A job can be started by a schedule or a file-watch Start trigger, never both -- Schedules disables itself with an explanatory tooltip the moment a Start-scope gate is already attached.

Pausing a schedule

When a job shouldn't run for a while -- "the customer asked us to skip tonight" -- don't deactivate it and set a reminder to turn it back on. On the job's page, in the SCHEDULE card, click Pause...:

  1. Pick how long: 3, 6 or 12 hours, until tomorrow at 6:00 AM, 1, 2 or 3 days, 1 week, or an exact date and time. The dialog shows the exact moment the pause ends, in your time, before you save.
  2. Type a reason. It's required, and it's kept with the pause so anyone can see later why the job didn't run.

While paused, the job's scheduled runs are skipped and each one is logged. A banner under the job name shows when the pause ends, why, who set it and how many runs it has skipped so far. When the time comes the schedule picks up on its own -- nothing to remember. Resume now in the banner ends it early; Change pause... replaces it with a new one.

  • Run Job still works. A pause only holds back the job's scheduled runs. You can still run it by hand.
  • Triggers that start the job from a file arriving, or from another job finishing, are not affected. A paused job doesn't finish a scheduled run, so jobs waiting on its completion simply don't start.
  • Pause history... lists every pause on the job -- who, why, how it ended -- and the exact scheduled runs each one skipped. Skipped runs are kept there, not in Recent Runs, so they don't count against the job's success rate or run-time charts.
  • Changing a pause takes Edit permission on the job; viewing the history takes View.
  • A pause belongs to the server it was set on. It isn't copied to other servers by Job Sync.

See job-scheduling.md for the full technical story.

See also: Glossary for related terms.