Crony

Crony is a simple and powerful command line cron job manager and scheduler written in Rust. It allows you to easily manage your scheduled tasks with human-readable schedule syntax.

Installation

You can install Crony via cargo with cargo install crony-cli to install the CLI into your system's PATH. (Make sure you have Rust and Cargo installed on your system.)

Usage

To use Crony, you can run crony in your terminal. This will start the CLI, where you can add, remove, and list scheduled tasks. You can also use crony run to start the scheduler, which will execute your tasks based on their defined schedules.

[!NOTE] Tasks that produce output will print it to the terminal output of the crony run command. If you want to retrieve the output of a task, you should redirect it to a file.

Configuration

You can also edit tasks via the tasks.toml file under ~/.config/crony/ (Unix) or %APPDATA%\crony\ (Windows). This file contains all your scheduled tasks, in a format like this:

[tasks.hello]
name = "hello"
schedule = "every 1 min"
command = "echo 'hi!'"

Running Crony as a Service

You can add crony run to your system's service manager to run it as a background service. This way, your tasks will be executed automatically based on their schedules.

Linux (systemd)

You can create a systemd service file for Crony. Create a file named crony.service in /etc/systemd/system/ with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=Crony Scheduler Service
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/crony run
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

After creating the service file, you can enable and start the service with the following commands:

sudo systemctl enable crony.service
sudo systemctl start crony.service

macOS (launchd)

You can create a launchd plist file for Crony. Create a file named me.durocodes.crony.plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>me.durocodes.crony</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/usr/local/bin/crony</string>
        <string>run</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

After creating the plist file, you can load it with the following command:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/me.durocodes.crony.plist

Windows (NSSM)

[!NOTE] You can also use the Windows Task Scheduler, but it requires more setup and is less straightforward than just using NSSM.

You can use NSSM (Non-Sucking Service Manager) to run Crony as a service on Windows. First, download and install NSSM from nssm.cc.

Then, you can create a service for Crony with the following command:

nssm install Crony "C:\path\to\crony.exe" run

After creating the service, you can start it with the following command:

nssm start Crony