this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Containerizing system crons to improve portability: yes/no? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I've recently been trying to containerize as much as I can to make my self-hosted system portable by simply backing up my docker data folder.

One thing I'm struggling with is whether or not to containerize a few system crons that I use for maintenance (for example, using wget to update some files, and using chmod to make sure my file permissions remain on point).

What I'd like to avoid is having to manually backup my crontab. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but any advice one way or another? Should I bother? Any disadvantages? Any docker image folks would recommend aside from a base alpine image?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It probably makes more sense to invest time to learn things like Ansible (and Sephamore if you want a webui) to script such basic things.

Other than that, maybe Cronicle or Crontab-ui could be useful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I’m happy to learn more tricks. Do you think one is more portable than another?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I mean its 1 command to store your user crontab and 1 to restore it, so I would not over complicate it...

backup:

crontab -l -u root > /tmp/your-crontab-backup

and restore:

crontab /tmp/your-crontab-backup

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I actually Containerized one of my CRON jobs that used rsync to copy my container volumes to my TrueNAS server (link).

I think it's a good idea and you'll learn a lot along the way. Plus if you open source it then it will be way easier for people to get it up and running.