Holds, maintenance windows and blackouts

Four things hold factory work. Held work is never dropped: it waits, shows up on the cockpit and in Checkpoints, and starts again when the hold lifts.

Hold	Set by	Holds
Pause	The cockpit’s Pause all automations	Every trigger. Running steps finish.
Stop	Settings’ Stop the factory	Every trigger. Running steps are cancelled.
Maintenance window	pix.maintenance	Every new step while the window is open.
Schedule blackout	schedules.blackout	Every new step while the window is open.

Pause and stop are covered in Pause, stop and resume. This page covers the windows.

Maintenance windows

A maintenance window is a recurring time when your Pix Sandbox may be updated and restarted. While it is open the factory starts no new step. A queued run becomes held and is queued again when the window closes; a run already running starts no new step until then.

[{ "days": ["sun"], "start": "02:00", "end": "04:00", "tz": "Australia/Melbourne" }]

This is the factory’s own setting. The sandbox’s page has a separate relaunch window, stored on the sandbox in a different shape, and saving one does not change the other. Each pix.maintenance window is evaluated in its own tz, not schedules.tz.

Schedule blackouts

A blackout is a recurring time when the factory starts no new work, such as a release freeze or a weekend. Runs that schedule fires or events start during the window wait as held until it ends.

[{ "from": { "day": "fri", "time": "16:00" }, "to": { "day": "mon", "time": "08:00" }, "label": "release freeze" }]

day is mon to sun, and time is HH:MM. Blackouts use schedules.tz, the timezone for every schedule. It defaults to UTC, so set it to your own zone before you rely on a blackout.

What happens to held fires

A schedule fire that arrives while the factory is paused or stopped starts no run; the scheduler is answered held with reason stopped. (The documented reasons are paused, stopped, maintenance or blackout, but a fire during a window is not held at the scheduler: it starts its run, which waits as held.) schedules.missed is the policy for held fires:

Value	When the hold lifts
run_once	One run per trigger that had held fires. The default.
skip	No run.
run_all	One run per held fire, up to 24.

The trigger table has no held-fire counter yet, so resume answers heldFires: 0 and reports the policy in applied without replaying any fire.

Seeing a hold

• The cockpit shows the factory state and whether a window is active now, with the next window and when it starts and ends.
• A held run has status held on the Runs page.
• The event stream records a run event held with the reason, and the audit log a gate.held entry.

Settings

Setting	Default	Format
pix.maintenance	none	list of {days, start, end, tz}. Stored on the sandbox.
schedules.blackout	none	list of {from: {day, time}, to: {day, time}, label}
schedules.tz	UTC	IANA timezone name
schedules.missed	run_once	run_once, skip, run_all

Related

• Schedules
• Pix Sandboxes