How do you deploy cron jobs to production?

Question

How do people deploy/version control cronjobs to production? I\'m more curious about conventions/standards people use than any particular solution, but I happen to be using git

Answer 1

There are really 3 options of manually deploying a crontab if you cannot connect your system up to a configuration management system like cfengine/puppet.

You could simply use crontab -u user -e but you run the risk of someone having an error in their copy/paste.

You could also copy the file into the cron directory but there is no syntax checking for the file and in linux you must run touch /var/spool/cron in order for crond to pickup the changes.

Note Everyone will forget the touch command at some point.

In my experience this method is my favorite manual way of deploying a crontab.

diff /var/spool/cron/ /var/tmp/.new
crontab -u  /var/tmp/.new

I think the method I mentioned above is the best because you don't run the risk of copy/paste errors which helps you maintain consistency with your version controlled file. It performs syntax checking of the cron tasks inside of the file, and you won't need to perform the touch command as you would if you were to simply copy the file.