grunt-crontab

Grunt plugin to update system crontab

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt.

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-crontab --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-crontab');

The "crontab" task

Overview

This task will set up jobs in the system crontab. The jobs are read from a file which by default is assumed to be called .crontab and located in the same directory as the Gruntfile.

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named crontab to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
  pkg: grunt.file.readJSON('package.json'),
  crontab: {
    dev: {
      namespace: '<%= pkg.name %>' + '.dev' , // this would be the default anyway
      cronfile: './my-crontab-dev' // override, default is '.crontab'
    },
    stage: {
      namespace: 'my-custom-namespace'
    }
  },
})

This task can be run repeatedly, every time the crontab entries generated by this task will be cleaned up and recreated.

Crontab File

{
  "jobs": [
    {
      "command": "cd <%= project.baseDir %> && echo '<%= pkg.name %>'",
      "schedule": "0 7 * * *", 
      "comment": "A job"
    },
    {
      "command": "bla -lha", 
      "schedule": "0 7 * * *", 
      "comment": "Another job"
    }
  ]
}

String Substitution

Some underscore/lodash placeholders in the crontab file will be expanded. Currently supported placeholders are:

Placeholder	Meaning
project.baseDir	Absolute path to directory where Gruntfile is located in
pkg.*	Contents of package.json, e.g. pkg.name for project name

Options

crontab.namespace

Type: String, default value: pkg.name

A comment starting with this string will be added to every entry created. We use this comment to identify the jobs to created by this module. Uses package name from package.json as default value.

crontab.cronfile

Type: String, default value: './.crontab'

Path to the file that contains the crontab entries. Format as described above.

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using Grunt.

Credits

This module is essentially a wrapper around dachev/node-crontab

License

Copyright (c) 2014 Joerg Henning. Licensed under the MIT license.