⏱️ Cron

crestic cron

Run scheduled jobs based on cron expressions.

Description

crestic cron is designed to be executed by system schedulers (cron, systemd timers, launchd, etc.).

When launched, it:

Determines which jobs should have run since the last execution time
Executes all due jobs in the correct order
Remembers last run time (won't miss jobs)

Locking behavior

Only one instance of crestic cron can run per configuration file name
A lock file is created in ~/.crestic/ and uses only the filename of the config, not the full path or extension
- Example: /etc/backup/crestic.yaml and /etc/backup/crestic.yml will share the same lock
- my.yml and config.yml will run in parallel, as their filenames differ
This prevents two processes from running the same jobs simultaneously, while still allowing multiple independent configs to run at the same time

Examples

# Run scheduled jobs (typically called from system cron)
crestic cron
 
# Add to system crontab
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/crestic cron --config /path/to/crestic.yaml

Scheduling

Define cron expressions in job configuration:

jobs:
  - name: daily-backup
    cron: "0 2 * * *"      # Daily at 2 AM
    # ... rest of config
 
  - name: hourly-backup
    cron: "0 * * * *"      # Every hour
    # ... rest of config

Notes

Crestic stores the last execution timestamp to ensure jobs are run even if cron wasn’t triggered exactly on time (e.g. machine was off)
If no job is due — it exits without doing anything
If a job fails, Crestic proceeds to the next one (jobs are independent)

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