Bug: Cron schedule boundary false negative - Renovate skips branch creation even in valid minute near hour/day rollover

[adelaon]

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted Renovate CLI

Which platform you running Renovate on?

GitHub.com

Which version of Renovate are you using?

42.99.0

Please tell us more about your question or problem

We are using version 42.99.0, but the same code is in the current repository:

isScheduledNow() (here) can incorrectly return false for valid cron windows near boundaries (e.g. xx:59) because cronMatches() (here) checks nextRun() and compares only hour/day/month with now.

For example, with schedule * 3-7 * * * at 05:59:54Z (Etc/UTC), this minute is inside the configured window (03:00-07:59), but Renovate logs Skipping branch creation as not within schedule and does not perform any update (the recently observed log sequence is attached).

Suspected cause:

In lib/workers/repository/update/branch/schedule.ts, cronMatches() currently does:

nextRun = parsedCron.nextRun()
return (
    nextDate.hour === now.hour &&
    nextDate.day === now.day &&
    nextDate.month === now.month
  );

This is a lossy comparison for “does now satisfy cron?”.
At 05:59:54, nextRun() is 06:00:00, so hour differs and match fails, even though now is valid.

Suggested fix

Since the smallest unit is a minute, it makes sense to check 'the next run after just before the current minute' to determine a minute-membership. This handles boundary cases unlike the same-hour/day/month proxy.

Pseudo-code:

const nowMinute = now.startOf('minute');
const probe = nowMinute.minus({ milliseconds: 1 });
const nextRun = parsedCron.nextRun(probe.toJSDate());
if (!nextRun) return false;

const nextMinute = DateTime.fromJSDate(nextRun).startOf('minute');
return nextMinute.toMillis() === nowMinute.toMillis();

Logs (if relevant)

Logs

Checking schedule(schedule=* 3-7 * * *, tz=Etc/UTC, now=2026-03-26T05:59:54.161Z)
Human-readable summary for cron:: Every minute, between 03:00 AM and 07:59 AM
Skipping branch creation as not within schedule
Package not scheduled