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Containerizing system crons to improve portability: yes/no? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by motherruker@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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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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[-] thekrautboy@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] motherruker@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

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

[-] p_235615@alien.top 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

[-] Minituff@alien.top 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.

this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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