I would like to improve on my project by using cron jobs. Currently, i have a web application that allows me to control servos. However I would like to add another function on the web application where i can set the cron job to execute a script that would control the servos automatically. meaning that i can click on a button on the web specifying that i'm not at home or something and that would tell cron job to take over.
Any idea how can i do this? A link or tutorial would be good too. :)
Is it just me or does the thought of allowing a web application to edit cron jobs give you the willies.
Here is how I would go about it: Setup a cron job to always run at the frequency you desire. Make it run the script you want. In the script the first thing you do is read a small settings file which tells it whether to continue or not, for instance
run=false
Now when you want the job to actually run you make your web application edit the settings file setting run=true and the next time the cron job is run the script will run in its entirety.
Just make sure you use absolute paths throughout.
run=false. However depending upon the programming language being used by the web application the settings file could be a script itself for instance a python script that simply contains run = False and is imported by the application. This avoids having to open, read content and close the file but has its own set of pitfalls.
Commented
Mar 30, 2014 at 10:40
Have you looked into GO based groundcontrol daemon at https://github.com/jondot/groundcontrol? It is very light on CPU resource and has a very simple control UI with various buttons for executing simple bash commands or complex scripts.
In your case, let's say you have a cronjob entry to allow a script named, servos.sh run every 30 minutes.
crontab -l
*/30 * * * * /scripts/servos.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
If you want conditional on/off for this cron job, then you can execute sed based command to enable/disable specific cronjob, and assign these commands to ON/OFF buttons in groundcontrol app.
Relevant portion of /etc/groundcontrol.json will look like this. Check groundcontrol documentation for installing daemon and editing config file.
"controls" : {
"servos_cron": {
"on" : "crontab -l | sed '/servos/s/^#//' | crontab -",
"off" : "crontab -l | sed '/^\*.*servos/s/^/#/' | crontab -"
}
}
PS: Upon clicking off button in groundcontrol UI, sed command will place "#" character at the beginning of running servos cronjob entry, given it begins with asterix. If your cron entry has different parameter at the beginning, edit off command accordingly.
Once you restart groundcontrol, you will get nice UI at localhost:4571 (port can be changed) allowing you to manage servos cron by pressing a button!
Hope that helps.
/etc/groundcontrol.json file for running groundcontrol as a daemon: pastebin.com/7w07CuXh Script is pretty much self-explanatory, and you can add/remove commands as per you need. Unlike other scripting, I doubt if json file respects comment character "#", and so I'd no comment lines within script. PS: I am not the groundcontrol owner but simply love that app!
Have you considered having cron always run your job and then have a flag that the script that cron starts checks to see if the script should execute or not.
This flag could be the presence of a file. If the file exists (easily checked in a shell script) the script would just exit.
Now all your web page needs to do is create the file if you want the script disabled and delete the file if you want the script to run.
Here's some python code to create and delete the flag file.
To create:
#!/usr/bin/python
import os
def touch(fname, times=None):
with file(fname, 'a'):
os.utime(fname, times)
# Create file called /tmp/flag_file
touch("/tmp/flag_file")
To delete:
#!/usr/bin/python
import os
myfile="/tmp/flag_file"
## if file exists, delete it ##
if os.path.isfile(myfile):
os.remove(myfile)
else: ## Show an error ##
print("Error: %s file not found" % myfile)
As far as I have understood your question and comments, what you are actually asking for is a way to access e.g. the python scripts by HeatfanJohn / edit the configuration file by Abid H. Mujtaba via your webserver.
The way I would to this is use a small PHP File. For this to work, you will need to have PHP installed. The File could look somewhat like this:
<?php
$path='/var/www/cron_onoff.txt';
$text=$_GET['arg'];
shell_exec('echo '.$text.' > '.$path);
?>
Save it for example as "cron_onoff.php" in your /var/www folder. Now, on your HTML Website, you add a link to enable, and another to disable:
<html>
<head>...</head>
<body>
<a href="cron_onoff.php?arg=on">Turn ON</a><br />
<a href="cron_onoff.php?arg=off">Turn OFF</a><br />
</body></html>
Now, when you click the first link, the text "on" (without quotes) will be written into the file you specified in the php-script, when you click the second link, the content will be replaces by "off". Whatever your cronjob runs should now open this file, and check if "on" is written there, otherwise stop executing. (See this StackOverflow question on how to do something like this with bash).
Also, if you decide to put the file cron_onoff.txt elsewhere, you might get some trouble with permissions to write. Remember, the active user for scripts executed via Webbrowser is 'www-data', so you have to grant at least some basic permissions. Also, if this doesn't work, your PHP might not have been configured to allow the execution of shell scripts.
Finally, you can, of course, use different commands in the shell_exec-Function. For example,
shell_exec('python /var/www/script.py');
could run one of the scripts provided by HeatfanJohn. Be sure to add the executable flag for the www-data user for the script: (run in Terminal)
cd /var/www
sudo chown script.py www-data:www-data
sudo chmod +x script.py
