Storing crontab file inside my project

Question

Currently, I am editing my production server's crons by typing crontab -e. I would like to store my crontab definitions inside my project, and have my system to load them from there.

Is there any way I can set up the servers existing crontabs to point to an include like this?

IncludeOtherCrontab /path/to/my/project/project.crontab

My system is CentOS release 5.4 (Final)

Answer 1

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I don't know whether you can include other files in your base crontab file, but maybe you could just order in your crontab to reload/alter it's contents?

Say, every 5 minutes cron executes your bash script which reads your 'project.crontab' and appends it to your crontab file.

Answer 2

The easiest way to do this is to put your crontab entry into a file under /etc/cron.d/. Take a look at some existing files there to see the syntax. You can either copy your file there manually (or via an installer such as rpm) or just use a symlink to the file located in your installed directory.

Answer 3

To do this portably (i.e. not using /etc/cron.d), assuming your deployment script must coexist with third-party crontab entries and provided your deployment script can execute commands on the target node, not just upload files:

test -f project.crontab && { { crontab -u user -l | awk '/^#BEGIN PROJECT SECTION/{hide=1;next}/^#END PROJECT SECTION/{hide=0;next}!hide{print}' ; echo '#BEGIN PROJECT SECTION' ; cat project.crontab ; echo '#END PROJECT SECTION' ; } | crontab -u user ; }

The above verifies that your project-specific crontab section exists, filters it from the given user's crontab (if it already is there, does nothing otherwise), appends the project section, then reloads the lot.