Schedule a Whole Week of TikToks in One Sunday Run With Claude Code (Recipe)

Most creators who post to TikTok every day don’t actually decide every day. They film in batches, then spend the week remembering to upload. The days they forget are the days the account goes quiet.

TikTok can already schedule a post for you. The catch is that scheduling one video means opening the upload page, adding the file, typing the caption and hashtags, flipping the schedule switch and picking a date and time. Do that seven times and you’ve spent your Sunday on clicking.

This recipe has Claude Code do the clicking. Once a week it takes the next videos from a folder, schedules each one on TikTok for its own day, and writes down what it queued. The posting itself is handled by TikTok’s scheduler, so nothing needs to run at 6 pm on Wednesday. Your computer can be off by then.

By the end you’ll have:

• a week folder with queue/ (videos waiting), scheduled/ (already handed to TikTok) and log.md,
• a Sunday-evening task in Claude Code Desktop that fills the coming week,
• a habit of one weekly look at the queue instead of seven daily chores.

Setup takes about 20 minutes. Who this fits: a creator who films ahead and posts to TikTok, on a computer that is on and awake on Sunday evening.

What TikTok allows (read this before you plan)

TikTok’s scheduler has two rules the recipe is built around. TikTok’s own announcement says you can schedule a video anywhere from 15 minutes to 10 days ahead, and that you can’t edit the video, caption or time after scheduling; you delete the scheduled post and upload it again. (That page also describes desktop scheduling as available for creators and Business Accounts; if TikTok Studio doesn’t show a schedule switch on your account, check your account type under Settings.)

That shapes the recipe:

• One Sunday run covers Monday to Sunday and stays inside the 10-day window.
• You review captions before they’re scheduled, because fixing a mistake later means delete and re-upload. That’s why the first run is supervised and the task prompt has a “hold back anything unclear” rule.

I also checked the PublishPort command set (publishport-opencli 1.0.40): TikTok publish has a --schedule flag that takes an ISO 8601 time or Unix seconds. YouTube and Instagram Reels commands have no schedule flag, so this recipe is TikTok only. For all three platforms posting live each morning, use the daily short-video recipe instead.

The recipe

You’ll paste this into Claude Code in step 1:

Read https://www.publishport.app/skill.md and follow it to set up PublishPort for me, then check that TikTok is connected. In this folder, create queue/, scheduled/ and log.md. For each video in queue/ I will add a text file with the same name holding a caption and a few hashtags. Take the three oldest videos in queue/, show me the caption, hashtags and scheduled time you plan for each (one per day at 6 pm my local time, starting tomorrow), and once I approve, schedule each one on TikTok using TikTok's own scheduler, move the files to scheduled/ and add a line per video to log.md. After that, help me turn this into a Claude Code Desktop scheduled task that does the same for up to seven videos every Sunday at 6 pm.

The skill file is a short public instruction sheet that tells the AI how to install itself, ask you for one authorization click, check which accounts your computer has connected and publish. Every AI you authorize shows on your account page, where you can revoke it.

Step 0: Get three things ready

1. The PublishPort desktop app, signed in to TikTok. Install it from the download page, open Platform accounts, click Sign in next to TikTok, sign in as you normally would in the window that opens, then click I’ve signed in (walkthrough).

2. The Claude desktop app with the Code tab. Local scheduled tasks need Claude Desktop 1.1.5368 or later, and they only fire while the app is open and the computer is awake (docs). The first run can be in the CLI; the task itself is created in Desktop.

3. Node.js and a folder with a few videos. The publishing command runs on Node.js: check with node -v or install the LTS release from nodejs.org. Create a folder named week and put two or three finished videos in a subfolder called queue. Next to each one, add a text file with the same name: for tip-14.mp4, a tip-14.txt like

Caption: The 10-second fix for muddy audio
Hashtags: contentcreator, videoediting, audiotips

Name files so the oldest sorts first (2026-11-03-tip.mp4) and you control the order.

Step 1: A supervised first run

Open the Code tab, start a session in the week folder and paste the recipe.

1. Claude installs the PublishPort skill and gives you an authorization link and a confirmation code. Open it, sign in or create a PublishPort account, check the code matches and click Authorize. The link lasts 10 minutes.
2. It checks your computer and tells you whether TikTok is signed in. If not, sign in again under Platform accounts and ask it to re-check.
3. It shows a table: video, caption, hashtags, scheduled time. Check the times carefully, and make sure they carry your time zone (for example 2026-11-02T18:00:00-05:00). Since scheduled posts can’t be edited, this is the moment to fix a typo.
4. Say yes. It schedules each video, which can take a few minutes per upload.
5. Open TikTok Studio and look at your scheduled posts. All three should be there with the right captions and times. If one is missing, tell Claude and it will check before retrying, so you don’t get duplicates.

Step 2: Create the Sunday task

Claude will offer to create the task; compare what it made with the steps here. By hand: in the Code tab click Scheduled, then New task (choose Set up manually if a menu opens). Under Advanced settings turn on Only on this computer, pick the week folder, and in the Trigger card choose Weekly, Sunday, 6 pm (Anthropic’s steps). Name it tiktok-week and paste:

This is a pre-approved weekly task. Don't ask me to confirm.

1. Read log.md. Find the last scheduled date so you continue the day after it. If the log is empty, start tomorrow.
2. List queue/. Take up to 7 videos, oldest first. If there are none, stop and say "queue is empty".
3. Each video needs a matching .txt with a caption. If a caption is missing or empty, skip that video and tell me; don't invent one.
4. Give video number n the time of day 18:00 in my local time zone (include the UTC offset), on consecutive days. Never schedule less than 1 hour or more than 9 days from now. If a slot falls outside that, stop there and leave the rest in queue/.
5. Check publishport guide tiktok for the exact publish options, then schedule each video through PublishPort with its caption, hashtags and --schedule time. One video at a time. If a command fails or times out, do not run it again right away: look at my scheduled posts in TikTok Studio first, and retry once only if the video is not there.
6. After each success, move the video and its .txt to scheduled/ and append the date, the file name, the time and the result to log.md.
7. End with a short summary: what is queued for which day, what was skipped and why, and how many videos remain in queue/.

Right after saving, click Run now (with an empty queue it just reports that). If the run stalls on a permission prompt, approve the PublishPort commands with “always allow”; later runs reuse that.

Step 3: Your 5-minute Sunday habit

The task makes the schedule; you only restock. Before Sunday evening, drop next week’s videos and caption files into queue/. After 6 pm, read the summary. If it says the queue has under seven left, that’s your cue to film.

If a scheduled video turns out wrong (a wrong caption, a clip you’d rather hold), delete it in TikTok Studio and put the file back in queue/. The log shows which date is free.

Why one weekly run beats seven daily ones

A daily task needs the computer on at exactly the posting time, every day. Batch scheduling moves the fragile part to one evening a week, and TikTok’s servers handle the actual posting. If you travel Wednesday with the laptop shut, Wednesday’s video still goes out. The trade-off is the one TikTok states: nothing can be changed once it’s scheduled, so the weekly review of captions is the control, not an afterthought.

If something doesn’t run

• Nothing happened Sunday: the Claude desktop app was closed or the computer was asleep. Check History on the task. Turn on Keep computer awake if sleep is the issue.
• “No device is online”: the PublishPort app isn’t running or is signed out. Start it.
• TikTok says you’re signed out: sessions expire. Sign in again under Platform accounts.
• No schedule option in TikTok Studio: the account may not have desktop scheduling. Check your account type in TikTok’s settings.
• “Schedule time must be later than now”: the time was in the past or in the wrong zone. Include the UTC offset.
• A time lands outside the window: TikTok’s limit is 15 minutes to 10 days ahead, so don’t queue more than a week plus a couple of days.

Taking it further

Pair it with the Monday analytics review: it reads last week’s numbers and rewrites the plan, which tells you what to film next. If you also want comments answered, the nightly comment digest covers that part.

The free plan covers setting all of this up; plan limits are on the pricing page.