What is maintenance window?

[ciltocruz]

Hello.
I don't understand this message.

The maturity period has passed, and I used to be able to update manually. Now I get this message. What is it? I've checked the documentation, but it seems to be some new feature.

[scttbnsn]

Short version: nothing is stopping you here. Click Update anyway and it updates right now.

A maintenance window is a schedule you set on a watcher that says "only apply updates during these hours". It's a cron expression:

DD_WATCHER_LOCAL_MAINTENANCE_WINDOW=0 2-3 * * *
DD_WATCHER_LOCAL_MAINTENANCE_WINDOW_TZ=Europe/Berlin

When that's set, Drydock holds automatic updates outside those hours and applies them when the window next opens. Manual updates from the UI have never been gated by it, and that hasn't changed. What's new is that the confirm dialog now lists any soft policy reason, so it tells you why the update hasn't already gone out on its own. Same behavior as before, it's just saying it out loud now.

It's also separate from the maturity gate, so "maturity has passed" and "outside the maintenance window" can both be true at once. Maturity says the build is old enough, the window says when Drydock is allowed to act.

If you don't remember setting one, search your compose file or env for MAINTENANCE_WINDOW. The dashboard also shows which watchers have a window and when the next one opens.

Docs:

• Maintenance windows
• Watcher configuration
• Update eligibility and blockers

And you were right that you couldn't find it. The dialog's own wording ("policy-blocked", "outside maintenance window") appears nowhere in the docs, and the dialog doesn't link out, so searching for what you actually saw on screen returns nothing. That's on us. I'll get the dialog linking to the blockers page and get the docs using the same words the UI does.

[scttbnsn]

Docs fix is up: #640.

One thing worth checking on your side while I had the code open. The window is matched minute by minute against the cron expression, it isn't read as a start/end range. Our own examples got this wrong, they all looked like this:

DD_WATCHER_LOCAL_MAINTENANCE_WINDOW=0 2-6 * * *   # 2am–6am daily

That comment is wrong. 0 2-6 * * * opens the window for one minute at 02:00, 03:00, 04:00, 05:00 and 06:00, and it's closed the rest of the day. So if you copied an example from our docs, your window is almost certainly narrower than you think, and that's why you're seeing the message. What you want is a * in the minute field:

DD_WATCHER_LOCAL_MAINTENANCE_WINDOW=* 2-6 * * *   # really open 02:00–06:59

Also worth confirming MAINTENANCE_WINDOW_TZ is set to your timezone. It defaults to UTC, not the host clock.

Sorry for the runaround on this one. The examples were misleading and the message you saw wasn't searchable anywhere, so you had no way to work it out.

[ciltocruz]

Thanks!