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Reference

Table of Contents

Resource types

  • cron: Installs and manages cron jobs.

Resource types

cron

Every cron resource created by Puppet requires a command and at least one periodic attribute (hour, minute, month, monthday, weekday, or special). While the name of the cron job is not part of the actual job, the name is stored in a comment beginning with # Puppet Name: . These comments are used to match crontab entries created by Puppet with cron resources.

If an existing crontab entry happens to match the scheduling and command of a cron resource that has never been synced, Puppet defers to the existing crontab entry and does not create a new entry tagged with the # Puppet Name: comment.

Important: The Cron type will not reset parameters that are removed from a manifest. For example, removing a minute => 10 parameter will not reset the minute component of the associated cronjob to *. These changes must be expressed by setting the parameter to minute => absent because Puppet only manages parameters that are out of sync with manifest entries.

Autorequires: If Puppet is managing the user account specified by the user property of a cron resource, then the cron resource will autorequire that user.

Examples

cron { 'logrotate':
  command => '/usr/sbin/logrotate',
  user    => 'root',
  hour    => 2,
  minute  => 0,
}
Note that all periodic attributes can be specified as an array of values:
cron { 'logrotate':
  command => '/usr/sbin/logrotate',
  user    => 'root',
  hour    => [2, 4],
}
...or using ranges or the step syntax */2 (although there's no guarantee that your cron daemon supports these):
cron { 'logrotate':
  command => '/usr/sbin/logrotate',
  user    => 'root',
  hour    => ['2-4'],
  minute  => '*/10',
}

Properties

The following properties are available in the cron type.

command

The command to execute in the cron job. The environment provided to the command varies by local system rules, and it is best to always provide a fully qualified command. The user's profile is not sourced when the command is run, so if the user's environment is desired it should be sourced manually.

All cron parameters support absent as a value; this will remove any existing values for that field.

ensure

Valid values: present, absent

The basic property that the resource should be in.

Default value: present

environment

Any environment settings associated with this cron job. They will be stored between the header and the job in the crontab. There can be no guarantees that other, earlier settings will not also affect a given cron job.

Also, Puppet cannot automatically determine whether an existing, unmanaged environment setting is associated with a given cron job. If you already have cron jobs with environment settings, then Puppet will keep those settings in the same place in the file, but will not associate them with a specific job.

Settings should be specified exactly as they should appear in the crontab, like PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin.

hour

The hour at which to run the cron job. Optional; if specified, must be between 0 and 23, inclusive.

minute

The minute at which to run the cron job. Optional; if specified, must be between 0 and 59, inclusive.

month

The month of the year. Optional; if specified, must be either:

  • A number between 1 and 12, inclusive, with 1 being January
  • The name of the month, such as 'December'.
monthday

The day of the month on which to run the command. Optional; if specified, must be between 1 and 31.

special

A special value such as 'reboot' or 'annually'. Only available on supported systems such as Vixie Cron. Overrides more specific time of day/week settings. Set to 'absent' to make puppet revert to a plain numeric schedule.

target

The name of the crontab file in which the cron job should be stored.

This property defaults to the value of the user property if set, the user running Puppet or root.

For the default crontab provider, this property is functionally equivalent to the user property and should be avoided. In particular, setting both user and target to different values will result in undefined behavior.

user

The user who owns the cron job. This user must be allowed to run cron jobs, which is not currently checked by Puppet.

This property defaults to the user running Puppet or root.

The default crontab provider executes the system crontab using the user account specified by this property.

weekday

The weekday on which to run the command. Optional; if specified, must be either:

  • A number between 0 and 7, inclusive, with 0 or 7 being Sunday
  • The name of the day, such as 'Tuesday'.

Day ranges can only be numeric; e.g. '1-5' for weekdays, but not 'Mon-Fri'.

Parameters

The following parameters are available in the cron type.

name

namevar

The symbolic name of the cron job. This name is used for human reference only and is generated automatically for cron jobs found on the system. This generally won't matter, as Puppet will do its best to match existing cron jobs against specified jobs (and Puppet adds a comment to cron jobs it adds), but it is at least possible that converting from unmanaged jobs to managed jobs might require manual intervention.

provider

The specific backend to use for this cron resource. You will seldom need to specify this --- Puppet will usually discover the appropriate provider for your platform.