noexcuses - runs important cronjobs until they succeed
Sometimes cronjobs fail to run successfully because a required server (like a database or FTP server) is temporarily unavailable due to power failures, hardware failures, software failures, network outages, choice of operating system, pilot error, and the like.
Typically, this results in someone being forced to examine crontabs and error reports, determine which cronjobs really need to be run, and then run them manually. This happened to me twice in one week. I don't want it to happen again. Cronjobs are meant to be automated and I want them to stay that way.
This is the rationale for noexcuses. It keeps track of cronjobs that have
failed and keeps running them until they succeed. All you have to do is look
at your crontabs, identify the cronjobs-that-must-succeed-no-matter-what and
insert noexcuses before the command.
Then, when cron runs noexcuses, noexcuses will run the given cronjob.
If the cronjob fails, noexcuses becomes a daemon that will retry the
cronjob regularly until it succeeds. Even if the cron host is rebooted
before the cronjob succeeds, noexcuses lets you restart all of the
outstanding cronjobs. Even if the cron host is down for a while, noexcuses
can tell you which cronjobs missed out on running while it was down and run
them. The initscript noexcuses.init can make this happen automatically at
boot time.
In other words, noexcuses is a free, lightweight, fine-grained, unobtrusive, high-availability tool for cronjobs. Or rather, it's a high-recoverability tool for cronjobs which can either be incorporated into a highly available system or used in the absence of one.
noexcuses is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
- Retry failed cronjobs until they succeed
- List outstanding jobs
- Retry outstanding jobs now
- Cancel outstanding jobs
- Recover cronjobs missing due to downtime
- Adopt another cron host's outstanding jobs
- Forget jobs adopted by another host
noexcuses is written in Perl, and uses pod2man and pod2html which come with Perl. It does not require any non-standard Perl modules. It does require a POSIX system and cron.
There is a manual entry:
- noexcuses(1) - the noexcuses(1) manpage
URL: http://raf.org/noexcuses
GIT: https://github.com/raforg/noexcuses
GIT: https://codeberg.org/raforg/noexcuses
Date: 20200625
Author: raf <raf@raf.org>