Handy crontab buildout recipe¶

Tags: grok, plone, thehealthagency, buildout

I've recently discovered a handy buildout recipe for maintaining your user's crontab: z3c.recipe.usercrontab (made by two of my colleagues). It is intended to add/remove entries to your user's crontab, not to maintain the system-wide /etc/crontab.d/*.

So for the obvious `@reboot` entry you'd add something like the following to your buildout:

  [buildout]
  ...
  parts = ... crontab

  [crontab]
  recipe = z3c.recipe.usercrontab
  times = @reboot
  command = ${buildout:directory}/bin/instance start

You can have multiple crontab parts in one buildout and you can have multiple buildouts writing to the same crontab. No problem at all. Existing entries are also preserved. Works like a charm.

Reinout van Rees

My name is Reinout van Rees and I program in Python, I live in the Netherlands, I cycle recumbent bikes and I have a model railway.

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