Question about ports adding cronjobs

[Marco Walraven]

Hi David,

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 07:40:19PM -0500, Paul Schmehl wrote:
> --On June 17, 2008 3:24:11 PM -0700 David Hawthorne 
> <dhawth at bitgravity.com> wrote:
> 
> >I have a piece of software I've been working on that gaThers stats about
> >the local host and shoves them into rrd files, with an accompanying web
> >front-end page that generates pretty graphs from the RRDs on demand.  I
> >have a package done up for it, and I'd like to add it to the ports tree
> >eventually, but I'm stuck on how to get it to automagically add the
> >cronjob to have the stats gathering script run every five minutes, and I
> >don't know of any ports that add cronjobs off the top of my head to go
> >look at.
> >
> >Is there an approved standard for doing this?  It doesn't have to be as
> >root, either, it can run under a different user.  Any advice on how to
> >get the port to add the user (and remove it properly when the port is
> >deinstalled) properly and securely would be appreciated as well.
> >
> 
> Look at mail/courier/files/crontab.in, 
> mail/exim/files/POST-INSTALL_NOTES.clamd and mail/mailman/pkg-install (and 
> those ports' associated files) for some examples of ways to deal with cron 
> jobs in a port.

Just finished a project where we created a custom port section which has 20 
ports currently. Some of them also automatically install a custom crontab. 
Actually ports should not be used to configure your system imho. However it 
can be easily done. 

What I did was adding a crontab snippet in a file under yourport/files, this 
is just one possibility. During installation of the port it gets added to a 
users crontab; it just uses 'cat' to do that.

The snippet uses a tag #<!-- begin crontab for yourport --> and ends with 
#!<-- end crontab for yourport --> which can be easily removed using 'sed' 
when you deinstall the port. By using these tags we now have multiple ports 
that can write a user's crontab without creating much clutter and scripting.
You only need to restart cron if you install the port.

 Marco

-- 
 Terantula - Industrial Strength Open Source
 phone:+31 64 3232 400 / www: http://www.terantula.com / pgpkey: E7EE7A46
 pgp fingerprint: F2EE 122D 964C DE68 7380 6F95 3710 7719 E7EE 7A46