RubyCron

Define your cronjobs in your favorite language, and get reporting for free!

By letting RubyCron deal with warnings, errors, and sending reports, you can focus on writing clean and effective cronjobs in Ruby.

• Bart Kamphorst

#> gem install rubycron

This gem depends on Mikel's wonderful mail gem.

By default, RubyCron assumes you have a local smtp server running on port 25 in order to send mail.

• ruby-1.8.7-p374 [ i686 ]
• ruby-1.9.2-p320 [ x86_64 ]
• ruby-1.9.3-p448 [ x86_64 ]
• ruby-2.0.0-p451 [ x86_64 ]
• ruby-2.1.1
• ruby-2.7.1
• jruby-1.7.11 [ x86_64 ]

Open a new file, require and include RubyCron, and then initialize a new RubyCronJob as follows:

	rcj = RubyCronJob.new( 	:author => 'John Doe',
  							:name   => 'test',
							:mailto => 'john@doe.com' )

Call RubyCronJob's execute method, and define your cronjob within the do-end block. Use the info, warning and error methods to create your reports.

	rcj.execute do 
	  info "Starting run on #{`uname -n`}"
	  unless File.directory?(Dir.tmpdir)
		warning "Something seems wrong with the tmp directory."
	  end
	  begin
	  File.open('/tmp/rubycrontest', 'w') do |f|
	  	f.write("Test completed successfully.")
	  end
	  rescue => e
	    error "Something went wrong trying to write to file: #{e.message}"
	  end
	end

That's it! Now when you run this cronjob, you will receive a report by email.

To activate the cronjob, add it to your crontab like any other cronjob. There are, however, two ways to do this: run the RubyCronJob as a stand-alone script, or have the RubyCronJob be executed by rcjrunner.rb.

For the stand-alone option, add a crontab entry like so:

min		hour	mday	month	wday	command
* 		* 		* 		* 		* 		test.rcj

For this to work properly, make sure your rubycronjob (test.rcj in this example) starts with a shebang and is executable.

Simply feed your rubycronjob to rcjrunner.rb as a command-line argument in your crontab entry:

min		hour	mday	month	wday	command
* 		* 		* 		* 		* 		rcjrunner.rb test.rcj

Sorting through hundreds of cron mails per day that report successful runs may be gratifying at times, but most sane people only care to be notified when their cronjobs fail. Not to worry, just add the following line to the RubyCronJob's initialization hash.

	:mailon	=> :error

RubyCron will now only report when errors occurred during the run. Other options are :none, :warning and :all (default).

Of course. Use

	:mailfrom => 'root@doe.com'

to change the From:-header.

No. You can use other smtp servers for delivery like so:

	smtpsettings = { 	:address              => 'smtp.gmail.com',
            			:port                 => 587,
            			:domain               => 'your.host.name',
		            	:user_name            => '<username>',
		            	:password             => '<password>',
		            	:authentication       => 'plain',
		            	:enable_starttls_auto => true  }
            
	rcj = RubyCronJob.new(  :author     	=> 'John Doe',
					 		:name       	=> 'test',
						 	:mailto     	=> 'john@doe.com',
						 	:mailfrom   	=> 'root@doe.com',
							:smtpsettings 	=> smtpsettings )

No problem. You can configure this behavior with

	:exiton	=> :all

Valid values are :none (default), :warning, :error, :all.

There sure is. Simply write your own ERB template, and tell the RubyCronJob about it with the :template directive.

	rcj = RubyCronJob.new(
		:author     	=> 'John Doe',
	 	:name       	=> 'test',
	 	:mailto     	=> 'john@doe.com',
	 	:mailfrom   	=> 'root@doe.com',
		:template 	=> 'my_template.erb' )

Note that from inside the ERB template (my_template.erb in the above example) you have access to the @warnings and @errors arrays.

Output to stdout and stderr can be very useful when debugging your cronjob. Just set the verbose flag to true:

	:verbose => true

Absolutely:

	:debug => true

This is roughly the equivalent of setting :verbose to true and :mailon to :none. It allows you to test your cronjobs without being spammed.

Yes. Set a file path in RubyCronJob's logfile variable, and all output will be redirected to file:

	:logfile => '/tmp/rcjlogfile.log'

Note that you will still receive email reports when you enable file logging.

Anything to prevent redundancy, right? Use the :configfile and :configurl directives to point towards YAML files that hold your configuration hashes. For instance, this works:

	rcj = RubyCronJob.new( :configfile => "my_config_file.yml" )

Or this:

	rcj = RubyCronJob.new( :configurl => "http://www.foo.bar/my_config.yml")

Or even a combination:

	rcj = RubyCronJob.new(  :configfile => "my_config_file.yml",
							:configurl 	=> "http://www.foo.bar/my_config.yml",
							:author    	=> 'John Doe' )

Note that in the latter case the values of the directives specified within the RubyCronJob itself will take precedence over the file or url directives.

Copyright (c) 2011 - 2018, Bart Kamphorst

(Modified BSD License)

All rights reserved.

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• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
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