README

Craft plugin to programmatically manage GNU/Linux cronjobs.

Deprecated:

With the release of Craft 3 on 4-4-2018, this plugin has been deprecated. You can still use this with Craft 2 but you are encouraged to use (and develop) a Craft 3 version. At this moment, I have no plans to do so.

Features:

Deal with your cronjobs in Craft.
Create new cronjobs.
Update existing cronjobs.
Manage cronjobs of others users than runtime user using some sudo tricks (see below).

Requirements:

crontab command-line utility (should be already installed in your distribution).
sudo, if you want to manage crontab of another user than runtime user without running into right issues (see below)

Installation:

The library can be installed using Composer.

composer require boboldehampsink/cronjob

Usage:

The plugin is composed of three models:

CronjobModel is an entity model which represent a cronjob.
Cronjob_RepositoryModel is used to persist/retrieve your jobs.
Cronjob_AdapterModel abstracts raw crontab read/write.

Instanciate the repository:

In order to work, the Cronjob_RepositoryModel needs an instance of Cronjob_AdapterModel which handles raw read/write against the crontab.

$crontabRepository = new Cronjob_RepositoryModel(new Cronjob_AdapterModel());

Create a new cronjob and persist it into the crontab:

Suppose you want to create an new job which consist of launching the command "df >> /tmp/df.log" every day at 23:30. You can do it in two ways.

In pure OO way:

$cronjob = new CronjobModel();
$cronjob->minutes = '30';
$cronjob->hours = '23';
$cronjob->dayOfMonth = '*';
$cronjob->months = '*';
$cronjob->dayOfWeek = '*';
$cronjob->taskCommandLine = 'df >> /tmp/df.log';
$cronjob->comments = 'Logging disk usage'; // Comments are persisted in the crontab

From raw cron syntax string using a factory method:

$cronjob = CronjobModel::createFromCrontabLine('30 23 * * * df >> /tmp/df.log');

You can now add your new cronjob in the crontab repository and persist all changes to the crontab.

$crontabAdapter = new Cronjob_AdapterModel();
$crontabRepository = new Cronjob_RepositoryModel($crontabAdapter);
$crontabRepository->addJob($cronjob);
$crontabRepository->persist();

Find a specific cronjob from the crontab repository and update it:

Suppose we want to modify the hour of an already existing cronjob. Finding existings jobs is made using some regular expressions. Search in made against the entire crontab line.

$results = $crontabRepository->findJobByRegex('/Logging\ disk\ usage/');
$cronjob = $results[0];
$cronjob->hours = '21';
$crontabRepository->persist();

Remove a cronjob from the crontab:

You can remove a job like this :

$results = $crontabRepository->findJobByRegex('/Logging\ disk\ usage/');
$cronjob = $results[0];
$crontabRepository->removeJob($cronjob);
$crontabRepository->persist();

Note: Since cronjobs are internally matched by reference, they must be previously obtained from the repository or previously added.

Work with the crontab of another user than runtime user:

This feature allow you to manage the crontab of another user than the user who launched the runtime. This can be useful when the runtime user is www-data but the owner of the crontab you want to edit is your own linux user account.

To do this, simply pass the username of the crontab owner as parameter of the Cronjob_AdapterModel constructor. Suppose you are www-data and you want to edit the crontab of user bobby:

$crontabAdapter = new Cronjob_AdapterModel('bobby');
$crontabRepository = new Cronjob_RepositoryModel($crontabAdapter);

Using this way you will propably run into user rights issue. This can be resolved by editing your sudoers file using 'visudo'.
If you want to allow user www-data to edit the crontab of user bobby, add this line:

www-data        ALL=(bobby) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/crontab

which tells sudo to not ask for password when you call crontab of user bobby

Now, you can have access to the crontab of user bobby like this :

$crontabAdapter = new Cronjob_AdapterModel('bobby', true);
$crontabRepository = new Cronjob_RepositoryModel($crontabAdapter);

Note the second parameter true of the Cronjob_AdapterModel constructor call. This boolean tell the Cronjob_AdapterModel to use 'sudo' internally to read/write the crontab.

Enable or disable a cronjob

You can enable or disable your cron jobs by setting the "enabled" attribute of a CronjobModel object accordingly:

$crontabJob->enabled = false;

This will have the effect to prepend your cronjob by a "#" in your crontab when persisting it.

Todo

Create ElementType to manage cronjobs from the CP

Changelog

0.1.1

Updated dependencies

0.1.0

Initial release that allows you to manage cronjobs programmatically

Credits

Based on TiBeN/CrontabManager

boboldehampsink / cronjob

Maintainers

Details