minicron

minicron makes it simple to monitor your cron jobs and ensure they are running both correctly and on schedule.

Sponsors

• If you are looking for a cloud-based monitoring service and dashboard for your cron jobs I recommend Cronitor.

Project Status

tl;dr: minicron is not being actively worked on at present.

The latest stable release is
v0.9.6, but
0.9.x is not being actively developed/supported.

This branch (master) is the current state of progress towards a v1.0 release, I do intend to continue
working on minicron but don't have as much spare time at the moment as I did in the past to dedicate to it.

After thinking about the future of minicron and its long overdue 1.0
release I've decided to focus it solely on the monitoring of cron jobs and doing
that really well and leave the management side to
other tools. As such all
the SSH based management of jobs has been removed.

• Overview
• Background
• Features
• Requirements
• Installation
• Usage
• Versioning
• Contributing
• Support
• Credit
• License

Overview

minicron runs your jobs via its easy to install client which lives on your server and relays the job data back to the
server (web ui) where you can view it and set up alerts to ensure the job is running correctly.

Screenshots

TODO: generate new screenshots for 1.0

Background

I initially developed minicron as part of my dissertation at university in 2014. The motivation for developing minicron comes
largely from my experience and frustrations using cron both in a personal and professional capacity.

Features

• Web UI
  • GUI for cron schedule create/read/update
  • View output/status as jobs run
  • Historical data for all job executions
• Alerts when jobs executions are missed or fail via:
  • Email
  • SMS (using Twilio)
  • PagerDuty (SMS, Phone, Mobile Push Notifications and Email)
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service
  • Slack

Requirements

OS

Should run on OSX and any Linux/BSD based OS.

Database

• SQLite
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL

Web Server / Reverse Proxy

Nginx

A simple example config for nginx is provided.

Apache

If you're using apache as your reverse proxy you need to ensure you have the following modules installed:

• libapache2-mod-proxy-html
• apache2-utils

Run the following to enable them and then restart apache
a2enmod proxy proxy_html proxy_http xml2enc

A simple example config for apache is provided.

Installation

TODO: update for 1.0

Usage

Run a command

minicron run 'mysqldump db > backup.sql'

The global --verbose option can also be passed to the run argument like so

minicron run --verbose ls

You can also run a command in 'dry run' mode to test if it works without sending the output to the server.

minicron run --dry-run 'zip -r backup.zip website'

for further information see minicron help run.

Get help

Running minicron with no arguments is an alias to running minicron help, minicron -h or minicron --help.
You can also use the help argument to get information on any command as shown above in the run a command section
or alternatively you can pass the -h or --help options like so minicron run -h.

Server

To launch the server (aka the Hub) run

minicron server start

by default it will bind to port 9292 on the host 0.0.0.0 but this can be configured by the command line
arguments --host --port and --path or in the config file.

By default the server will run as a daemon with its process id stored in /tmp/minicron.pid
you can also use the stop, restart and status commands to control the server.

To run the server in debug mode, so you can see its output and any errors, you can pass the --debug
option.

Version

Like many command line programs minicron will show its version number when the global options -v
or --version are passed to the CLI.

Configuration

Some configuration options can be passed in manually but the recommended way to configure minicron is through the use
of a config file. You can specify the path to the file using the --config global option. The file is expected
to be in the toml format. The default options are specified in the
server.toml file and minicron will parse a config located in /etc/minicron/server.toml if it
exists. Options specified via the command line will take precedence over those taken from a config file.

Versioning

All stable releases will follow the semantic versioning guidelines.

Releases will be numbered with the following format:

<major>.<minor>.<patch>

Based on the following guidelines:

• A new major release indicates a large change where backwards compatibility is broken.
• A new minor release indicates a normal change that maintains backwards compatibility.
• A new patch release indicates a bugfix or small change which does not affect compatibility.

Contributing

Feedback and pull requests are welcome. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md
for more info.

Areas that I would love some help with:

• Any of the unassigned issues here.
• General testing of the system. Let me know what you think, and create issues for any bugs you find!
• Tests!!
• Validation and error handling improvements
• Documentation improvements.
• Look for 'TODO:' notices littered around the code,
  I'm trying to convert them all to issues but there are a lot...
• Code refactoring: I had a deadline to meet for the initial versions so some parts are a tad rushed
• UI improvements

Support

Where possible I will try to provide support for minicron but I offer no guarantees.

Feel free to open an issue and I'll do my best to help.

Credit

minicron makes use of a lot of awesome open source projects that have saved me a lot of time in its development.
I started out trying to list all of them but it was taking way too much time so check out the dependencies in
minicron.gemspec and
app.rb.

License

minicron is licensed under the GPL v3 - see here for the full license