This looks really cool! Couple of comments:
* This is EXACTLY how you should make a README file for a tool/project, especially on Github. Every project needs to take after this example before they register a domain and create an HTML5 splash page.
* Thank you so much for using existing tools and not building a new cron or transport protocol from scratch. Now I know this builds on top of reliable tools.
* Would it be difficult to remove the web sockets requirement? Orgs with old, non-replaceable web servers/proxies, or old network appliances with layer7 proxies, might find this handy but not be able to support web sockets.
* Instead of a 'DROP TABLE', why not a 'CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS' ? (In my own projects I usually make all the database table/column names into static variables at the top of my code, so people can modify them if they want) Still, it's nice of you to include a tool that modifies/verifies the db automatically.
* Kinda off topic: I just wrote an open-source replacement for Dead Man's Snitch, an out of bound alerting tool intended to be used by cron. If you want I can share the source so you can either use it, or create your own implementation that works with a remote copy of minicron?
Really interesting! It would be great if the readme could go into more detail about how the relationship between the hub, CLI, and cron works, including an explicit description of what text goes in the crontab files.
How do you get the reports of each run back to the hub? Are you wrapping each cronned command in a script which captures the output?
Does the hub have its own notion of what jobs exist on each machine? If so, there is the potential for this to get out of sync with what's really on the machine (manual editing of crontab, database crash and restore from an old backup, etc). Is there any way to detect that, and bring them back into sync?
Can the hub form an opinion on whether any job has failed to run when it should? Can that be exposed to something like Nagios?
How do i integrate this with rcron for my highly available cronjobs?
Have you thought about supporing sqlite for a database? It would simplify deployment considerably in simple cases.
Oh yes. This looks FANTASTIC. I started writing a similar thing before, but was very basic and I gave up after realising the crontab could not made group writable. I struggled to think of a way to get around that and of course, SSH to the rescue. I very much look forward to testing this out later. Top work!
I just added SQlite support back into master, I'll add it into the next release :) https://github.com/jamesrwhite/minicron/pull/70
Great idea! Also see if there's anything you want to steal/borrow from Chronos - http://nerds.airbnb.com/introducing-chronos/
Nice, I will give the feedback as soon as I test it (later today). By the way, I was recently looking for a crontab manager like this and didn't find any, seems like a tool that was missing.
Jenkins is your friend here.
however this does look very sexy.
Hi Guys, I've been developing minicron as part of my dissertation at university and I'm at the stage now where I need to get as much feedback as possible so I can evaluate the success of my project in general. I'd really appreciate any comments/feedback you have, be it on the code, documentation, idea in general or anything else you think is relevant. Thanks!