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Comment by ohnoesjmr | Hacker News Reader

Can you name some?

I've been looking for software in that space, a thing that runs cronjobs, with ability to kick off adhoc runs from some UI, see what is running, and if possible parameterise the custom runs (i.e., run an ad-hoc report for a different client than usual cron does)

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There's a lot to expore here. First, I'd suggest that cron and shell scripts may not be what you want. Cron has a complex format for scheduling and can lack features like sub-minute level scheduling, maintenance windows, and other task cadences. Shell scripts are OK for small things, but often I find I move to a different language if I keep something around long enough. Do the people writing jobs know shell?

For jobs run by data analysts, airflow and python work great. For devops jobs, begrudgingly, Jenkins or GitHub Actions. But there's so many varieties.

GitHub actions.

I almost suffocated from all the yaml typing this, but unfortunately it’s the baseline.

Build the UI or API for the report, so you can ad-hoc from there. Cron uses that interface. You don't custom the cron, you cron the custom.

Rundeck fits this space.

I almost hate to say it, but Jenkins.

That's what I did. I know it was the right solution because I happily keep adding more and more scripts to run. I didn't do that when I was using cron jobs.

Plus, Jenkins has a few nice extensions to the crontab, including setting a timezone and using "H" to spread job execution load.

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