snaked - cron as it should be.
# import old cron jobs (TO BE IMPLEMENTED) snaked --import-crontabs # check which jobs are configured snaked --show-jobs # rock with snake snaked --daemon # (and do not forget to stop old cron # so your jobs are not run twice)
snaked is a job scheduler, just like cron, which has several unique features making it much more flexible and useful than any other cron implementation.
It is heavily tested on Linux and FreeBSD but might (and hopefully with your help will) be run on any Perl + POSIX compliant system.
You can choose to configure the maximum limit of time for each job to finish. If job doesn't finish in time it is killed. The limit is independently configurable for each job. Forget about lockf, ps -ef | grep -v grep and cron jobs being run twice and more times concurrently.
You can also configure the upper limit of execution time of any job of the given snaked instance. This global limit is checked independently of the individual job execution time limits.
Each snaked job has its unique job identifier which is used to configure job dependencies: for any job you can specify other jobs (addressed by their identifiers) which shouldn't be run with this job concurrently.
So if job A is being executed and time comes to start job B which is configured as conflicting with job A, then the start of job B is postponed until job A is finished.
snaked allows jobs to be run more often than once a minute.
Actually snaked supports two execution schedule formats: old cron format with not less than a minute time resolution and snaked job schedule format which specifies how often the jobs is run in seconds, making it possible to run job even once a second!
snaked configuration is a directory which contains global instance options (each option in separate file) and associated job definitions where job definition is also a directory with each job option stored in a separate file:
. |-- admin_email |-- jobs | |-- every_hour | | |-- cmd | | `-- execution_schedule | |-- every_ten_seconds | | |-- cmd | | `-- execution_interval | `-- fast_job | |-- cmd | |-- conflicts | `-- execution_interval `-- log
Above shown configuration defines admin_email for the snaked instance (optional, defaults to root) and log file path (optional, defaults to /tmp/snaked.log):
testing18:/etc/snaked# cat admin_email root testing18:/etc/snaked# cat log /var/log/snaked/snaked.log
There are three jobs named every_hour, every_ten_seconds and fast_job. All of them contain cmd file -- an executable which is run by snaked (this can be any executable allowed by underlying operating system):
testing18:/etc/snaked/jobs/every_hour# ls -l cmd -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2010-07-07 00:24 cmd testing18:/etc/snaked/jobs/every_hour# file cmd cmd: POSIX shell script text executable
First job, every_hour, has a parameter execution_schedule which is an old cron schedule example (parsed by Schedule::Cron::Events):
testing18:/etc/snaked/jobs/every_hour# cat execution_schedule 0 * * * *
Two other jobs use snaked execution_interval schedule, specifying that every_ten_seconds job should be run once in ten seconds, and fast_job should be run once in every second.
testing18:/etc/snaked/jobs/every_ten_seconds# cat execution_interval 10 testing18:/etc/snaked/jobs/fast_job# cat execution_interval 1
To make it a bit more explanatory we've defined conflicts option for fast_job which specifies that fast_job should not be run if every_ten_seconds is running:
testing18:/etc/snaked/jobs/fast_job# cat conflicts every_ten_seconds
Which translates to "try to run 'fast_job' as often as once a second, but wait if 'every_ten_seconds' job is running".
Optional. Where to send emails about failing jobs. Defaults to root.
Optional. Name of the log filename which holds all the log messages including informational and error messages. Defaults to /tmp/snaked.log.
Optional. Name of the log filename used only for error messages. Defaults to nothing, turning off separate error logging.
Optional. Size of the log file after which it is rotated. Defaults to 10 MB.
Optional. Number of rotated log files to preserve. Defaults to 2.
Optional. Specifies maximum exeuction time limit for all the jobs. Defaults to 2 hours.
Optional. Filename of the pidfile where snaked stores the pid of its main process. Defaults to nothing, which does not generate any pidfile.
Optional. Where toe send emails about failures of this job. Defaults to global admin_email option (and overrides it).
Mandatory. Executable with correct file permissions (executable bit on) which is allowed by underlying operating system. Can be shell script or binary.
Only one parameter, execution_interval or execution_schedule, is allowed and is mandatory for one job. execution_interval specifies number of seconds (positive integer) between invocations of cmd. execution_schedule specifies standard cron format schedule (first five fields) for the job.
Optional. Specifies time limit for the job, in seconds. Defaults to nothing, turning time limit off.
Optional. Specifies time in seconds between TERM and KILL signals sent to the job when snaked needs to stop the job (when snaked stop or restarts, when job runs too long). Defaults to 60 seconds.
Optional. Time period in seconds. Job failure emails are not sent more often than this time period. First email is sent after first time period of constant failures. This option is used to suppress emails about accidental job failures. Defaults to 0, which turns the feature off (delivers email on every job failure).
Optional. Time period in seconds which specifoes random first run shift in time for the job. Defaults to 0, which turns the feature off.
Optional. Space/line separated list of job identifiers which should not be run while this job is run. If any job from this list is currently being executed then the job owning the option will not be executed. Defaults to nothing, allowing the job to be run independently of the status of any other job.
snaked organizes conflicting jobs into job groups, running every job from the job group one by one (if the time for the job has come). This guarantees that every conflicting job is run from time to time though its start time might be shifted because of waiting for the conflicting jobs.
Thanks to the whole Yandex team and personally to the following people (in alphabetic order):
Denis Barov Maxim Dementyev Eugene Fedotov Andrey Grunau Andrey Ignatov Oleg Leksunin Dmitry Parfenov Alexey Simakov Dmitrij Tejblum Julie S Ukhlicheva Anton Ustyugov Andrey Zonov
for their bug reports, suggestions and contributions.
Petya Kohts <petya@kohts.ru>
Copyright 2009 - 2012 Petya Kohts.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
To install snaked, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm snaked
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install snaked
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.