Scheduled events

Admin → Scheduled Events (/admin/events/). A built-in cron
replacement — runs maintenance jobs inside the same process as the
web app, on a one-minute tick, with results visible in the admin UI
(no need to grep syslog).

How it works

A background thread wakes every 60 seconds, loads all rows where
Enabled is checked, and fires any whose schedule says they're
due. Each row records last_run_at, last_status (ok/fail),
last_duration_ms, and the first 4KB of output — all shown in the
admin list. Editing or disabling a row takes effect on the next tick
(within a minute), no restart needed.

There's no per-event timeout enforced by the scheduler — a handler
that hangs blocks the next tick's events. Handlers that shell out to
something that could run long (like shell) enforce their own
timeout instead (see below).

Creating an event

Fields on the New/Edit form:

• Name — free text, shown in the admin list only.
• Handler — picks the built-in function that runs (see table
  below). Each option shows its description and expected params
  once selected.
• Schedule — one of:
• Daily — pick a time (HH:MM, UTC).
• Hourly — pick a minute-of-hour (0–59).
• Weekly — pick a day (Mon–Sun) + time, UTC.
• Every N min ("interval") — repeats N minutes after the
  previous run finished, not wall-clock-aligned.
• Params (JSON object) — handler-specific arguments. Must be a
  JSON object, even if empty ({}). This trips people up most
  often — the box does not accept a bare string or path. If
  your handler takes one argument called command, you write
  {"command": "/path/to/script.sh"}, not just the path.
• Enabled — unchecked rows never fire, but stay in the list.

There's also a Run now button per row for testing without
waiting for the schedule — same code path either way, so output
shown after a manual run matches exactly what a scheduled fire would
produce.

Built-in handlers

shell handler — worked example

Running a nightly TW2002 external-events script via dosemu2:

Params (JSON object):

{"command": "/opt/anetbbs/doors/dos/tw/event.sh", "timeout": 120}

event.sh:

#!/bin/bash
export TERM=linux
cd /opt/anetbbs/doors/dos/tw
/usr/libexec/dosemu2/dosemu2.bin -td EXTERN.EXE

The export TERM=linux and -td (dumb-terminal mode) are required
because the scheduler runs the command with no controlling tty —
dosemu2's normal door launches get a real PTY from door_runner.py,
but a scheduled shell command doesn't. Without these, dosemu2 fails
with ERROR: TERM environment variable needs set. before it ever
reaches your DOS program.

Default events on a fresh install

Seeded once (idempotent — re-running the seeder skips handler keys
that already have a row):

Any of these can be disabled, deleted, or have their schedule
changed — they're normal rows, not special-cased.

Troubleshooting

• "Params (JSON object)" rejects what I typed — it must parse as
  a JSON object. /path/to/script.sh is not valid JSON; wrap it as
  {"command": "/path/to/script.sh"}.
• shell handler crashes with UnicodeDecodeError — fixed as
  of v1.0a2.116+; older builds decoded captured output as strict
  UTF-8 and crashed on non-UTF8 bytes (e.g. CP437 from DOS programs
  run via dosemu2/dosbox). Update if you still see this.
• dosemu2 commands fail with TERM environment variable needs set — see the worked example above; export TERM and pass
  -td in your script.
• An event always fails the same way — click Run now and
  read the captured output; it's the same stdout/stderr you'd
  get running the command by hand over SSH, just minus your
  interactive shell's environment (PATH, TERM, etc. may differ from
  your login shell — set them explicitly in the script if needed).