cronner

The cronner cookbook installs cronner and provides a custom resource for configuring cron jobs that are wrapped with cronner. The resource is a wrapper of the cron_d resource and injects the cronner invocation before your command allowing the status and metrics to be collected.

Recipe Usage

This cookbook intends to try and track all major versions of the cronner binary, to make it easy to switch between versions just with an attribute change. By default this cookbook uses the latest version if one is not specified otherwise. To install cronner, just execute the cronner::default recipe by including it one of your recipes or by adding it to the run_list.

Recipe Attributes

This cookbook only has one attribute to impact the installation (node['cronner']['default_install_version']), which takes the cronner version string (e.g., 0.4.2) that you want to have installed.

Resource Usage

The cronner cookbook provides a custom resource to install cron jobs that are monitored by cronner. This resource is a light wrapper around the stellar cron_d resource, originally from the cron cookbook, but now included with Chef. That means the cronner resource has all the same attributes available as the cron_d resource. For information on the cron_d resource please see the documentation.

cronner 'db_backup' do
  command 'pg_dump ...'
  minute '0'
  hour '23'
  user 'postgres'

  # cronner is meant to replace the usage of mailto to alert you of errors or problems
  # however, it's a good idea to still set it if cronner were to hit its own internal issues
  # this actually happened in an early version of cronner where it would randomly hit a stdlib bug
  mailto 'ops@example.com'

  event true
  lock true
  log_fail true
  event_group 'db_operations'
  metric_group 'db_operations'

  warn_after 60 * 30 # (30 minutes)
  wait_secs_for_lock 60

  action :create # default action
end

Cronner Custom Resource Attributes

The custom resource supports either :create or :delete.

Attribute	Description	Default
event	Tell cronner to emit an event on job start/stop	false
event_fail	Tell cronner to emit an event only on job failure	false
log_fail	Tell cronner to log a file on disk with the command output on failure only	false
lock	Tell cronner to take a exclusive file lock before running the job	false
event_group	The group tag to add to the events emitted	nil
metric_group	The group tag to add to the metrics emitted	nil
label	The label (name) of the cron job, used for metrics and events	resource_name
namespace	The namespace to emit metrics under, the binary uses 'cronner' if this is omitted	nil
passthru	Attach the output of the command to the controlling TTY	false
use_parent	Tag the events and metrics with the parameters provided by the parent invocation of cronner	false
sensitive_output	This tells cronner to try and avoid printing the output of the command because it may contain sensitive data	false
warn_after	Number of seconds to let cronner run a job before it emits a warning that it's running too long	0 (disabled)
wait_secs_for_lock	Tells cronner how long it should wait for the exclusive lock before bailing out	0 (disabled)

License

This cookbook is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. Please refer to the LICENSE file for the full contents of the license.