LousyJob

This is a very simple background job runner for macOS. I use it for things like periodically exporting data from cloud services.

Motivations

• launchd is cumbersome to configure and getting visibility into jobs or manually starting/stopping jobs from the CLI is a pain; I wanted something simpler
• macOS has made it increasingly difficult to authorize shell scripts to truly access all files; by giving LousyJob.app full disk access and any other permissions you need, all the jobs you run with it can have full access

Features

• Define all your jobs in one JSON file
• Optionally specify a time interval for each job to run it automatically
• Status bar menu lets you easily see job status, run/kill jobs manually, and access job logs
• ...that's pretty much it

Comparative Advantages

• No dependencies, because I'm too lazy to learn a Swift package manager
• Small, simple code base, because I barely know how to use Swift at all
• Straightforward configuration due to minimal functionality

TODO

• Ideally, it should be configurable on each job whether or not the app passes full disk permissions etc on to that job.

Configuration

Create a .lousyjob file in your home directory. Here's a sample:

{
  "interval": 600,
  "logdir": "~/.local-only/lousyjob/logs",
  "jobs": [
    {
      "id": "test",
      "title": "Test Job",
      "executable": "/bin/bash",
      "arguments": ["-lc", "echo hello world"],
      "interval": 1200
    }
  ]
}

The top-level interval specifies, in seconds, how often to check whether any jobs are due. Note that if you set any individual job's interval to a lower value, they still won't run more frequently than this.

logdir is the path to a directory for storing logs. Each job will get separate files for stdout and stderr as well as a file containing information about each time a run of the job started or finished.

Each entry in the jobs array contains:

• id: a unique identifier, which is used in log file names
• title: the job name to show in the status menu and notifications
• executable: path to the program the job should run
• arguments: array of command-line arguments; generally, as in this example, I use my shell as the executable, -lc as the first argument, and the actual command as the second argument, so that my PATH and anything set up in eg .bash_profile will be available to the command
• interval: optional; if present, the job will be run automatically when this many seconds have passed since the completion of the last run

Installation

Compile the app in Xcode, place it in your Applications folder, and open it.

License

This is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.