Daily Operations

Running the machine day to day: the schedule, the kill switch, cost control, cadence, logs, and manual posting.

← Contents ⬇ Download full PDF Glossary & Index

Looking for the how-to?This page is the day-to-day reference. For numbered, step-by-step procedures with the exact commands, see Playbooks.

The daily schedule

Time (UTC)	Where	Job	Does
05:00	main	gen-social-feed.py	Build the day's content feed, ship to hub
05:10	hub	generate.py	Turn feed into scheduled posts
*/10 (every 10 min)	hub	publish_due.py	Publish anything due
05:20	hub	report.py	Write the digest
04:17	hub	backup.sh	Back up the hub

The kill switch

Freeze all posting instantlyCreate one file and nothing publishes on any tenant until you remove it:

# stop everything
ssh root@64.227.29.192 touch /opt/portal/PAUSE

# resume
ssh root@64.227.29.192 rm /opt/portal/PAUSE

The publisher checks for this file first, every run. Use it any time something looks wrong — it is instant and total.

Cost control

The whole system costs $24/month to run (the hub server). Content generation is free. The only per-post cost is X.

Control	Setting	Effect
Facebook & Instagram	—	Free to post. No cap is applied, deliberately — throttling a free channel only costs reach.
X daily cap	`X_DAILY_CAP` in `publish_due.py` (default 3)	Never more than N paid X posts/day; Bluesky is unaffected and free.
Cadence	`cadence` per tenant in `clients.json`	How many posts a tenant keeps in flight (~1/day at 7).
Channels	`channels` per tenant	Drop `"x"` to go 100% free.

Hard ruleThe system runs on a flat subscription. It never uses per-token AI billing — content is template-generated, so audits and scale can't blow a budget.

Changing cadence or channels

# edit the tenant config on the hub
ssh root@64.227.29.192 nano /opt/portal/clients.json
# then regenerate (safe to run anytime)
ssh root@64.227.29.192 python3 /opt/portal/generate.py

Set "require_approval": true to route a tenant through the approval queue instead of auto-posting.

Posting on demand

To push something immediately, add it to the queue with its time set to now and run the publisher:

ssh root@64.227.29.192 python3 /opt/portal/publish_due.py

The publisher processes any post whose scheduled time has passed.

Monitoring & logs

Log	What
/var/log/social-feed.log	Nightly feed build (main droplet)
/var/log/portal-gen.log	Post generation
/var/log/portal-pub.log	Publishing results + live URLs
/var/log/portal-rep.log	Reports

Failures also push a phone notification via ntfy, so you hear about a problem without watching logs.