crontub is a virtual crontab... it abstracts the definition of the crontab. Currently the abstraction takes the form of scanning files for special CRON declarations which are then assembled into a crontab as if someone had written a text file.
Why? crontub let's your programmers specify how and where a script should run under cron inside the script itself. This means that you can place crons under version control and have crontub find them and run them at whatever time has been specified.
In addition, crontub let's you specify a role checker so that you can have different crontabs run on different environments (by adjusting the role checker).
The config file:
[cron]
pidfile = path
roletest = somecommand`
'pidfile' is a path to a pidfile, where the daemon records it's pid, by default the pidfile is in /tmp/crontub.pid
'roletest' specifies that somecommand be run to establish whether the cron should be run here or not.
the roletest command is executed with the % template variables:
- 'role' set to the role being tested
- 'user' set to the user being tested
for example, setting 'roletest' thusly:
roletest = /usr/local/bin/check_is_staging -u %(user)s %(role)s
with a role of "staging" and a user of "woome" would cause the following command to be executed:
/usr/local/bin/check_is_staging -u woome staging