Watch: Schedule a Cron Job task in Linux - Ansible module cron

How to automate the schedule of command execution to a specific minute, hour, day, month, weekday, and user in Linux using cron service.

I'm going to show you a live Playbook and some simple Ansible code.

I'm Luca Berton and welcome to today's episode of Ansible Pilot.

Ansible schedule a Cron Job task in Linux

ansible.builtin.cron

Manage cron.d and crontab entries

Today we're talking about Ansible module cron.

The full name is ansible.builtin.cron, which means that is part of the collection of modules "builtin" with ansible and shipped with it.

It's a module pretty stable and out for years and it works in a different variety of operating systems.

It manages cron.d and crontab entries.

For Windows targets, use the ansible.windows.win_scheduled_task module instead.

Parameters

name string - crontab name

state string - present/absent

job string - command to execute

user string - defaults to the current user

minute, hour, day, month, weekday string - '\', '1–31', '\/2'

special_time - annually/daily/hourly/monthly/reboot/weekly/yearly

cron_file - NEVER use for /etc/crontab

This module has some parameters to perform any tasks.

The only required is "name", where you specify the description of a crontab entry.

The parameter "state" sets whether the cron job is present or not in the target host.

The parameter "job" sets the command to execute or, if env is set, the value of the environment variable.

The parameter "user" sets the specific user for the crontab, when unset, this parameter defaults to the current user.

The most important part is the moment to run the crontab, specifically: "minute", "hour", "day", "month", "weekday". In this field, you could use the star operator "\*" to specify all the minutes, hours, weekdays, days, and months. You could be more specific with a single number, range, or intervals.

There are also some special times already defined in the parameter "special_time". The options are: annually, daily, hourly, monthly, reboot, weekly, yearly.

Let me also highlight that we could also specify the "cron_file" if you want a specific name and not under the user.

Links

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/builtin/cron_module.html

https://crontab.guru/

## Playbook

Ansible schedule a Cron Job task in Linux.

code

cron.yml

``yaml


---
name: cron module Playbook
  hosts: all
  tasks:
   - name: "example cronjob"
     ansible.builtin.cron:
      name: "test"
      state: present
      minute: "*/2"
      hour: "*"
      day: "*"
      month: "*"
      weekday: "*"
      job: 'logger "ansible-pilot"'