Cronutils

This tool is designed to simplify the configuration and dispatching of tasks via cron, as well as to give nicely formatted error reports by email.

It can be installed by pip:

pip install cronutils

For the email error reporting to work properly, this project depends on cronic: http://habilis.net/cronic/

On ubuntu, one can use the following set of installs:

sudo apt-get install sendmail mailutils moreutils

Project Setup

To use this project, put a file called cron.py at the top level of your project:

from sys import argv
from cronutils import run_tasks

FIVE_MINUTES = "five_minutes"
HOURLY = "hourly"
FOUR_HOURLY = "four_hourly"
DAILY = "daily"
WEEKLY = "weekly"
MONTHLY = "monthly"

TASKS = {
    FIVE_MINUTES: [],
    HOURLY: [],
    FOUR_HOURLY: [],
    DAILY: [],
    WEEKLY: [],
    MONTHLY: [],
}

TIME_LIMITS = {
    FIVE_MINUTES: 180, # 3 minutes
    HOURLY: 3600,      # 60 minutes
    FOUR_HOURLY: 5400, # 1.5 hours
    DAILY: 43200,      # 12 hours
    WEEKLY: 86400,     # 1 day
    MONTHLY: 259200,   # 3 days
}


if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(argv) <= 1:
        raise Exception("Not enough arguments to cron\n")
    elif argv[1] in TASKS:
        cron_type = argv[1]
        run_tasks(TASKS[cron_type], TIME_LIMITS[cron_type], cron_type)
    else:
        raise Exception("Invalid argument to cron\n")

Then, add the following to your cron config, modifying MAILTO and PROJECT_PATH appropriately:

PROJECT_PATH="/path/to/project_name"
MAILTO="user@example.com,user2@example.com"

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/5 * * * * : five_minutes; cd $PROJECT_PATH; chronic python cron.py five_minutes
0 */1 * * * : hourly; cd $PROJECT_PATH; chronic python cron.py hourly
30 */4 * * * : four_hourly; cd $PROJECT_PATH; chronic python cron.py four_hourly
15 0 * * * : daily; cd $PROJECT_PATH; chronic python cron.py daily
0 2 * * 0 : weekly; cd $PROJECT_PATH; chronic python cron.py weekly
15 1 1 * * : monthly; cd $PROJECT_PATH; chronic python cron.py monthly

NOTE: if you don't want error emails, remove the MAILTO line from your config

NOTE: The above config only works if you are using Vixie cron (the default on ubuntu/debain). If you are on a different version of cron, replace each instance of $PROJECT_PATH with the actual project path rather than setting the variable at the top

For any functions you want to run, import them in cron.py and put the function name in the appropriate list. For example, to run the functions backup_database and send_server_info daily, you would do:

from package.path import backup_database
from other_package.path import send_server_info

...

TASKS = {
    FIVE_MINUTES: [],
    HOURLY: [],
    FOUR_HOURLY: [],
    DAILY: [backup_database, send_server_info],
    WEEKLY: [],
    MONTHLY: [],
}

...

Kill Times

The time limit of tasks specified in TIME_LIMITS is for emailing you about tasks that take longer than expected to run. If a task takes over four times the time limit (see MAX_TIME_MULTIPLIER), the process of that task is killed. You can specify your own custom kill time by passing in param kill_time to run_tasks. For example, here is an alternate cron.py that specifies custom kill times:

from sys import argv
from cronutils import run_tasks

FIVE_MINUTES = "five_minutes"
HOURLY = "hourly"
FOUR_HOURLY = "four_hourly"
DAILY = "daily"
WEEKLY = "weekly"
MONTHLY = "monthly"

TASKS = {
    FIVE_MINUTES: [],
    HOURLY: [],
    FOUR_HOURLY: [],
    DAILY: [],
    WEEKLY: [],
    MONTHLY: [],
}

TIME_LIMITS = {
    FIVE_MINUTES: 180, # 3 minutes
    HOURLY: 3600,      # 60 minutes
    FOUR_HOURLY: 5400, # 1.5 hours
    DAILY: 43200,      # 12 hours
    WEEKLY: 86400,     # 1 day
    MONTHLY: 259200,   # 3 days
}

KILL_TIMES = {
    FIVE_MINUTES: 300, # 5 minutes
    HOURLY: 3600, # 1 hour
}


if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(argv) <= 1:
        raise Exception("Not enough arguments to cron\n")
    elif argv[1] in TASKS:
        cron_type = argv[1]
        run_tasks(TASKS[cron_type], TIME_LIMITS[cron_type], cron_type, KILL_TIMES.get(cron_type))
    else:
        raise Exception("Invalid argument to cron\n")

Error Aggregation

Then, within any task you want cron to run on, you can get batched error reports using the error handler like so:

from cronutils import ErrorHandler

def some_daily_task():
    error_handler = ErrorHandler()
    for i in range(1024):
        with error_handler:
            do_dangerous_code()
    error_handler.raise_errors()

Any errors generated in the with block will be aggregated by stacktrace, so if there are errors, you will get a report that looks like this:

===============
OCCURRED 924 TIMES:
IndexError('list index out of range',)
  File "some_file.py", line 3, in some_daily_task
    do_dangerous_code()
  File "some_file.py", line 5, in do_dangerous_code
    some_list[i]
===============

Sentry Integration

To have run_tasks raise exceptions instead of logging to stderr, pass the argument use_stdio=False. Here is a full example:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(argv) <= 1:
        raise Exception("Not enough arguments to cron\n")
    elif argv[1] in TASKS:
        cron_type = argv[1]
        run_tasks(TASKS[cron_type], TIME_LIMITS[cron_type], cron_type, KILL_TIMES.get(cron_type), use_stdio=False)
    else:
        raise Exception("Invalid argument to cron\n")

The ErrorHandler also integrates with the Sentry error management service. You can access this by importing ErrorSentry and using it as you would the regular ErrorHandler. When your code encounters an error ErrorSentry will send a report to your Sentry account. You may provide it the with a full, valid Sentry DSN if you have not configured sentry elsewhere.

If you want to customize the Sentry client you can pass it extra keyword arguments at instantiation (see example below). You can also access the client directly if you want to further interact with it, for example by providing additional context.

from cronutils import ErrorSentry

# Simplest instantiation
error_sentry = ErrorSentry(sentry_dsn=MY_DSN)

# Complex configuration
error_sentry = ErrorSentry(sentry_dsn=MY_DSN,
                           sentry_client_kwargs=SENTRY_CLIENT_KWARGS)

error_sentry.sentry_client.client.user_context({
        'email': request.user.email
    })

ErrorSentry also has an optional sentry_report_limit parameter that limits the number of times a specific error will be reported. Note that errors are counted based on their stack trace, under some conditions you will still receive multiple similar error reports. Error counts are tracked per-ErrorSentry instance.

Django Integration

The simplest way to integrate with Django is to make a management command for your cron tasks. For example:

from django.core.management import BaseCommand
from cronutils import run_tasks

class Command(BaseCommand):
    def add_arguments(self, parser):
        cron_type_help = "Which frequency-group of tasks to run"
        parser.add_argument("cron_type", type=str, choices=TASKS.keys(), help=cron_type_help)
    
    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        cron_type = options["cron_type"]
        run_tasks(TASKS[cron_type], TIME_LIMITS[cron_type], cron_type, KILL_TIMES.get(cron_type), use_stdio=False)

Debugging

There is also a debugging mode: the NullErrorHandler. This class is a drop-in replacement for all usages of the ErrorHandler and ErrorSentry classes. What does it do? Absolutely nothing. Just change an import as follows and errors will be raised as if the ErrorHandler or ErrorSentry were not present:

from cronutils.error_handler import NullErrorHandler as ErrorHandler

from cronutils.error_handler import NullErrorHandler as ErrorSentry

Breaking Changes From 0.3 to 0.4

With version 0.4.0, cronutils has switched the underlying handler for the ErrorSentry class from raven to the newer sentry-sdk. This means that any configuration of the ErrorSentry client via sentry_client_kwargs should be refactored to be passed to sentry-sdk.init() rather than initializing raven's SentryClient.