Crontab UI

Editing the plain text crontab is error prone for managing jobs, e.g., adding jobs, deleting jobs, or pausing jobs. A small mistake can easily bring down all the jobs and might cost you a lot of time. With Crontab UI, it is very easy to manage crontab. Here are the key features of Crontab UI.

1. Easy setup. You can even import from existing crontab.
2. Safe adding, deleting or pausing jobs. Easy to maintain hundreds of jobs.
3. Backup your crontabs.
4. Export crontab and deploy on other machines without much hassle.
5. Error log support.
6. Mailing and hooks support.

Read this to see more details.

Setup

Get latest node from here. Then,

npm install -g crontab-ui
crontab-ui

If you need to set/use an alternative host, port OR base url, you may do so by setting an environment variable before starting the process:

HOST=0.0.0.0 PORT=9000 BASE_URL=/alse crontab-ui

By default, db, backups and logs are stored in the installation directory. It is recommended that it be overriden using env variable CRON_DB_PATH. This is particularly helpful in case you update crontab-ui.

CRON_DB_PATH=/path/to/folder crontab-ui

If you need to apply basic HTTP authentication, you can set user name and password through environment variables:

BASIC_AUTH_USER=user BASIC_AUTH_PWD=SecretPassword

Also, you may have to set permissions for your node_modules folder. Refer this.

If you need to use SSL, you can pass the private key and certificate through environment variables:

SSL_CERT=/path/to/ssl_certificate SSL_KEY=/path/to/ssl_private_key

Make sure node has the correct permissions to read the certificate and the key.

If you need to autosave your changes to crontab directly:

crontab-ui --autosave

List of ennvironment variables supported

• HOST
• PORT
• BASE_URL
• CRON_DB_PATH
• CRON_PATH
• BASIC_AUTH_USER, BASIC_AUTH_PWD
• SSL_CERT, SSL_KEY
• ENABLE_AUTOSAVE

Docker

You can use crontab-ui with docker. You can use the prebuilt images in the dockerhub

docker run -d -p 8000:8000 alseambusher/crontab-ui

You can also build it yourself if you want to customize, like this:

git clone https://github.com/alseambusher/crontab-ui.git
cd crontab-ui
docker build -t alseambusher/crontab-ui .
docker run -d -p 8000:8000 alseambusher/crontab-ui

If you want to use it with authentication, You can pass BASIC_AUTH_USER and BASIC_AUTH_PWD as env variables

docker run -e BASIC_AUTH_USER=user -e BASIC_AUTH_PWD=SecretPassword -d -p 8000:8000 alseambusher/crontab-ui 

You can also mount a folder to store the db and logs.

mkdir -p crontabs/logs
docker run --mount type=bind,source="$(pwd)"/crontabs/,target=/crontab-ui/crontabs/ -d -p 8000:8000 alseambusher/crontab-ui

If you are looking to modify the host's crontab, you would have to mount the crontab folder of your host to that of the container.

# On Ubuntu, it can look something like this and /etc/cron.d/root is used
docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -v /etc/cron.d:/etc/crontabs alseambusher/crontab-ui

Resources

• Full usage details
• Issues
• Setup Mailing after execution
• Integration with nginx and authentication
• Setup on Raspberry pi

Adding, deleting, pausing and resuming jobs.

Once setup Crontab UI provides you with a web interface using which you can manage all the jobs without much hassle.

Import from existing crontab

Import from existing crontab file automatically.

Backup and restore crontab

Keep backups of your crontab in case you mess up.

Export and import crontab on multiple instances of Crontab UI.

If you want to run the same jobs on multiple machines simply export from one instance and import the same on the other. No SSH, No copy paste!

But make sure to take a backup before importing.

Separate error log support for every job

Donate

Like the project? Buy me a coffee!

Contribute

Fork Crontab UI and contribute to it. Pull requests are encouraged.

License

MIT