Croncape

Croncape wraps commands run as cron jobs to send emails only when an error or a timeout has occurred.

Out of the box, crontab can send an email when a job generates output. But a command is not necessarily unsuccessful "just" because it used the standard or error output. Checking the exit code would be better, but that's not how crontab was standardized.

Croncape takes a different approach by wrapping your commands to only send an email when the command returns a non-zero exit code.

Croncape plays well with crontab as it never outputs anything except when an issue occurs in Croncape itself (like a misconfiguration for instance), in which case crontab would send you an email.

Installation

Download the binaries or go get github.com/sensiocloud/croncape.

Usage

When adding a command in crontab, wrap it with Croncape:

0 6 * * * croncape -e "[email protected]" -c "ls -lsa"

That's it!

You can also send emails to more than one user by separating emails with a comma:

0 6 * * * croncape -e "[email protected],[email protected]" -c "ls -lsa"

Besides sending emails, croncape can also kill the run command after a given timeout, via the -t flag (by default, the limit is 1 hour):

0 6 * * * croncape -e "[email protected]" -t 2h -c "ls -lsa"

If you want to send emails even when commands are successful, use the -v flag (useful for testing).

Use the -h flag to display the full help message.

Croncape is very similar to cronwrap, with some differences:

• No dependencies (cronwrap is written in Python);

• Kills a command on a timeout (cronwrap just reports that the command took more time to execute);

• Tries to use sendmail or mail depending on availability (cronwrap only works with sendmail).

For a simpler alternative, have a look at cronic.