crondir

Manage your user crontab with snippets in a cron.d directory in your home.

Simplifies the automated management of cron tasks in the user space. Snippets are concatenated from your cron.d into the crontab.

• Store and manage crontab snippets in separate files
• Does not interfere with existing crontab entries
• Backs up crontab each time it builds
• Everything configurable

Usage

A crontab snippet is a file containing lines to go in a crontab.

To install:

pip install crondir

Add a cron snippet:

crondir add path/to/snippet_name

Remove a cron snippet:

crondir remove snippet_name

List installed cron snippets:

crondir list

Build the crontab from current definitions:

crondir build

Or you may find it easier to skip the install step and run it using uv.

uvx crondir add path/to/snippet_name
uvx crondir remove path/to/snippet_name
uvx crondir list
uvx crondir build

By default, crondir stores crontab snippets in ~/.cron.d/, and creates backups in ~/.cron.d/backups/.

For full command line options, see command documentation

Example

Lets say we're deploying a project with hourly and daily cron tasks, and will be running it from a deploy user. Our project is at /home/deploy/project/

Create a snippet file in our project, cron_tasks, containing the lines to add to the crontab:

0 * * * * /home/deploy/project/bin/hourly_refresh.sh
1 0 * * * /home/deploy/project/bin/daily_refresh.sh

To add this snippet, run:

cd ~
uvx crondir add project/cron_task project_tasks
uvx crondir build

This will:

• create the dir ~/.cron.d/
• copy project/cron_task into ~/.cron.d/ as ~/.cron.d/project_tasks
• rebuild the crontab to include the lines from ~/.cron.d/project_tasks

If we want to remove the snippet, we can run:

cd ~
uvx crondir remove project_tasks
uvx crondir build

This will

• remove the file ~/.cron.d/project_tasks
• concatenate all the files in ~/.cron.d
• add them to the crontab under any existing unmanaged entries