Crondog

Crondog is designed to take the pain out of creating and deploying cronjobs. Currently, it's just a simple DSL for describing how often tasks should occur.

Set finite times with 'at', and chain them with 'and':

at(10).hours.and(0).minutes "sum 1 through 5" do
  (1..5).inject {|sum, i| sum + i }
end

Periodic tasks use 'every':

every(5).minutes "ping production server" do
  `ping 127.0.0.1`
end

Set up ranges with 'from' and 'to':

from(9).to(17).hours "sit at desk" do
  # code goes here
end

You can use literal day and month names:

on("Tuesday").at(11).hours "talk to Morrie" do
  # code goes here
end

If you're ending with a literal, use a comma:

during "April", "bring an umbrella" do
  # code goes here
end

Some more examples can be found in the tests. The next step is to create rake tasks to generate ruby scripts and set up the cron directives.

Dependencies

We're using ParseTree and Ruby2Ruby to convert procs into strings, and ActiveSupport for a few utility methods.