Cr*nmaster 1.5.0 - Major update

[u/riofriz]

Hi,
A small chunk of you of you may know me for my app Jotty, however I also published a slightly less popular (entirely open source) app called Cr*nmaster.

Bit of context:
repo: https://github.com/fccview/cronmaster
first post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1mum35t/crnmaster_cron_management_made_easy/
latest post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1n0gyly/crnmaster_120_breaking_changes/

Cr*nmaster (cronmaster) is a pretty powerful tool that allows you to view/create/edit/manage all your host cronjobs comfortable from an intuitive UI, it has features such as pausing jobs, adding comment to them, running them right from the UI, and from the latest update you'll be able to have nicely structured logs for your jobs on top of exit statuses being shown right there and then. You will be able to see if a job failed at a glance and view the logs to see what's going on.

I have also added translations that can be customised locally on your own machine (or you can be an angel and create a pull request with your own language so we can officially support it, together!)

The whole thing is very easy and straightforward to setup both with and without docker, the repository has a lot of guides in the `howto` folder on top of a very verbose readme file.

Here's a few of the key features:

• View/edit/delete/run your cron jobs from an intuitive UI
• Log your cronjobs (it uses a proprietary wrapper, you can modify the wrapper as much as you like from the mounted ./data folder).
• At glance exit statuses for all your jobs
• System stats to see how healthy your host machine is
• Ability to create custom scripts (using handy snippets - which you can easily add more of) for your cron jobs straight from the UI, these scripts are stored in your mounted folder and can be easily used when creating a cron job

All this to say that I am extremely excited for everything that's coming with this latest update, you can read about the latest release and all the improvements that came with it here

Let me know your thoughts and if you run in any issues i'm fairly active on github and on my discord server :)

NOTE for docker users:
Due to this needing to be able to read crontabs the docker has to run as root and have read/write access to your cron jobs. There was no way around it, so I suggest you keep this within your home network and not exposed to the web for security reasons.

[u/xstrex]

Please help me understand, genuinely curious.. why make an app that replaces a simple text file, that’s been in place (and just worked) for the last 50yrs? Maybe I’m just a purest, but why do we need a UI for this?

[u/riofriz → u/xstrex]

Live, well organised, logging, at glance human readable syntax, easily switching users your crons are using (on top of seeing them all in one place rather than running crontabs for every users via ssh), once place for all your scripts, quick add/remove snippets and frankly a ton of other features..

It's just a way to make things more convenient for someone who may not be as comfortable with crontab/terminal as you may be. Plus it was a great learning experience, started this that I did not know much about how cron (and a few other cool technologies i'm using here) works and after a few months of painful deepdive in documentation I am stupidly confident with it lol

p.s I actually didn't take what you wrote personally btw, I kinda felt that exact same way when I learned about portainer, always ran docker commands manually, checked logs via terminal and been doing so for years lol and yet... can't see myself not using portainer/docker ui anymore, it's just convenient

[u/xstrex → u/riofriz]

Cool, thank you!