How syncing works

Every night

Every night, Malmoi publishes saved changes or picks up new repository changes for each active project.

The nightly run is scheduled for 18:00 UTC. For each project it does at most one thing: publish unsent edits, update the project from the repository, or skip because there is nothing to do. Each visit leaves at most one event in Logs, marked Nightly.

Which projects are checked

A project must be active, connected to a repository, and have at least one source whose first sync has succeeded. Archived or unconnected projects are excluded. A run checks at most 50 projects, starting with those that have waited longest since their last nightly check; it may stop earlier when time runs out, so some projects may wait until another night. A project with new commits reached late in a run is also left for the next night, where it moves to the front.

Automatic publishing

If any saved edit is unsent, the nightly run publishes the project's saved changes through a change request (a pull request on GitHub). An open pull request is updated instead of opening a second one. That night the project is not updated from the repository.

Saved values that cannot be published stay in Malmoi. If your changes were not published overnight, check Logs and ask a project owner about any reported failure.

Updates from the repository

If nothing is waiting to be published, the nightly run checks whether the branch Malmoi reads has new commits since Malmoi last read your sources.

• No new commits and nothing failed last time: nothing is read and the event says Up to date. If a file failed to update, the nightly run tries again each night until it succeeds.
• New commits: Malmoi reads the sources from the repository and updates the project, the same way a project owner's Sync does, but without discarding anything. On Home, the Sync tab then shows Nightly sync as the Last sync, with when it finished under Synced and how many translations it changed under Changed.

If someone saves a translation while the nightly update is running, Malmoi stops before the next source so the new edit is not overwritten. The sources it already updated stay updated.

When the nightly run holds an update

The nightly run holds the update — the project is not updated, and Logs shows Held with the reason — when:

• A Malmoi pull request is still open. Its translations are not in the repository yet, so an update would overwrite them. Merge or close the pull request; the next nightly run picks up the changes. Home's Sync tab shows Held in its Hold row, and the To send card says why.
• GitHub didn't answer whether that pull request is open. Malmoi does not guess; Home shows Held, and the next run checks again.
• The change is too large for a server-side sync. Nightly updates use the same file budget as creating a project (see Limits). Reduce the files' size, or deliver the change with the repository workflow.

If the nightly run can't read the repository's branch, or GitHub doesn't answer in time, the event shows Failed in Logs instead of a hold. If the branch no longer exists, Home also shows the sync as failed until the next successful sync; if GitHub only failed to answer, Home is unchanged and the next run tries again. A project owner can check the branch and the GitHub connection in project Settings.

Nightly sync or the workflow

The workflow is optional. Without it, the nightly run picks up repository changes once a day. With the workflow, your repository's GitHub Actions sends changes on every commit to that branch, and also collects code references. In Logs, workflow runs are marked CI; CI is your repository's workflow.

What happens next

The next nightly run checks projects that remain eligible. Read each night's result in Logs.