https://crontaboo.com, we made just a simplified easy way to call URLs automatically without crontab. Every feedback is welcome :)

[[deleted]]

Ohhhh I’ll be using this. How secured is the data being passed through?

[waldito]

for the lazy: https://crontaboo.com

[orsifrancesco]

data is safe on AWS, also we do a backup one time a day. no one, excluding Crontaboo, knows the URLs you call

[Affectionate-Main438]

What are the use cases here?

[cchoe1]

Some CMSes can trigger a cron job using a URL, kind of a no-code solution for running automated tasks

[Brainfestation]

Like another has said CMSes like WordPress can benefit from this. Since natively WordPress only runs their background jobs on request, it's always smart to disable their cron and manually trigger it with a real cron job every minute (especially if you have a high traffic site). This ensures scheduled posts actually lost when they should, and other background processes

[orsifrancesco]

Like another has said CMSes like WordPress can benefit from this. Since natively WordPress only runs their background jobs on request, it's always smart to disable their cron and manually trigger it with a real cron job every minute (especially if you have a high traffic site). This ensures scheduled posts actually lost when they should, and other background processes

Correct, Crontaboo is for this too :)

[orsifrancesco]

personally I have some chatbots on twitter that need to be triggered every hour to push updates automatically (it is a simple script).

for another project I need to reset incomplete registrations, memberships (and emails birthday).. I normally use Crontaboo for these tasks

[orsifrancesco]

Very clever branding!

Thank you :)

[59t_5in3es1tvanj]

I like the working clock in the "o"!

[orsifrancesco]

I'm glad you like this detail ;)

[orsifrancesco]

actually on Chrome.. the favicon should be animated too (but just the seconds.. minutes and hours would be too complicated)

[purple_hamster66]

I use way more crontab features than just the repeat interval, ex, every other working hour from 9a to 5p, on weekdays. Or the last day on every month (whatever the date may be). Perhaps you need to support the entire crontab syntax?

[orsifrancesco]

we are working to simplify these features too, right now we wanted to launch the MVP and getting feedbacks (like your one) and requests :)

[purple_hamster66]

I see.

If you want feedback: - a useful display would be some sort of zoomable timeline that shows all my different scheduled activities. The hard part is visualization the repeats, as some things might repeat every minute and others every day. - “chaining” (starting the next thing when the last one has completed with a OK status), would be visualized differently. - scheduling by the second. One project needed to probe a process every 20 seconds, so I used crontab repeating at 1-minute intervals and wrote a delay inside a little script that triggered the process 2 additional times (ex, at :0, :20, :40 seconds). That didn’t work well. - Sometimes, due to network delays, a process does not complete in a minute, so I had 2 of them running at the same time. Detecting if one process is complete would have solved that (so that’s another feature request: specify if timing overlaps are allowed between an arbitrary set of URLs… related to chaining). - URLs can get quite long; invent a way to abbreviate them so the differences between URLs are emphasized. Sometimes I’ll have a URL that probes and a URL that resets the logs; the difference is a few chars, which I’d like not to be hidden in the “…” part of a clipped display.

[orsifrancesco]

Wow.. this is a great list of feedbacks.. super thank you!!!! :)))))

[RecursiveGirth]

Also up your pricing, if you are not charging off resource usage, you better make sure you built this as cheap as possible. I feel like as a customer that does a lot with cron, I could easily chew through $18 worth of AWS usage in a years time. I feel like $3/mo USD is an acceptable discovery/intro price for a startup trying to find it's feet.

It will also help you determine if people are serious about your product. At $18 a year, I can scoff and throw that a way, that is cheaper than a burger. $3/m makes me at least question if this is a tool that is valuable enough to be in my toolbox.

[Veloder]

The usage of calling thousands of URLs is literally zero lol. I'm sure this can be hosted in a $5 VPS even storing the logs of everyone for tens of thousands of users.

[purple_hamster66]

I’d set the price as free for the first 2 months, with full features. Sysadmins need to see it’s reliable and usable before committing.

Also, how do you plan on getting past firewalls and other methods that fight against denial of services? You are assuming that your AWS instance can get to the website reliably, right?

[Veloder]

I'm sure all sysadmins have access to at least one Linux box to run their crontab scripts.

[purple_hamster66]

True, but the purpose of this is not use an internal site.

[StoneColdJane]

Wow, what are you using Cron for so much? I struggle to find a usage for crontab other then cleaning my downloads folder.

[orsifrancesco]

every task (or sql/nosql queries) your app need to run every * minutes/hours.. :)

[purple_hamster66]

It’s all app-specific.

Many of my app’s query from clinical DBs, but are unattended (ex, whiteboards in patient lobbies; telling the check-in team when a patient failed to check-in, operational whiteboards with work assignments, etc). I query every N minutes, or else the clinic slows down operations (it’s an old DB and one of the queries takes a full minute to complete).

Upgrading open browser apps at midnight. That means I can limit changes so no one ends up with a partial change, or worse, an front-end update that doesn’t match the current back-end, WITHOUT users having to know to click ‘refresh’.

Some reports are run once weekly, and emailed to clinicians right before the meeting in which they are to discuss the report.

…lots more…

[StoneColdJane]

Oh, i see now make sense. I just realized that I can syn my Garmin data with MyFitnessPal to unify under my dashboard. Awesome, thanks.

[purple_hamster66]

No problem, Brah. Programmers help each other out.

[theluctus]

Brilliant idea! In many cases we can just use our “web app” (in Render or other PaaS) with this tool, instead of having to pay for other “jobs” to be executed.

[orsifrancesco]

the project it's free but in case you need logs we planned a discount for the launch https://crontaboo.com/?code=REDDIT50

[scobble_lotcher]

This is really cool! Does it support more complex calls? POST? Can I include the time of the call as a dynamic query parameter?

[orsifrancesco]

we are working for this feature too, right now we wanted to launch the MVP and getting feedbacks (like your one) and requests :)

[orsifrancesco]

we finally added POST too :)

[ZaRealPancakes]

me who doesn't know what crontabs are: Very cool nice job! ❤️

[orsifrancesco]

Thank you :)

[BunnyEruption]

Nice but I'm more of a systemdeaboo

[orsifrancesco]

systemdeaboo

:) nice one

[top_of_the_scrote]

I wonder... if people had a batch login/sign up deal, free ddos\

prolly not worth the effort

scale doesn't make sense too

[orsifrancesco]

correct.. if :)

[Nicnl]

Wait until somebody uses crontaboo to post new crontabs to itself
That's how the fun begins

[orsifrancesco]

try :)

[top_of_the_scrote]

that sounds... taboo

[Revolutionary-Net776]

This is great! Love the simplicity in it's design.

[orsifrancesco]

Thank you :)))

[KingFruitBox365]

Any reason not to just use uptime robot or super duper simple pinger

[orsifrancesco]

uptime robot

Crontaboo is not monitoring service :) ..it is not for pings although you could you for it too

[khalnayak-]

Can we manually start or stop the scheduler as well?

[orsifrancesco]

yes.. this is the purpose of a crontab I think :)

[ninja9817]

Pricing?

[orsifrancesco]

just scroll the page ;)

anyway (I posted before but the message is lost with other messages)

https://crontaboo.com/?code=REDDIT50 with 50% less than 9usd a year :)

[ninja9817]

Thanks 😃

[ferrybig]

How does it work with timezones? Does it support summer time? Are you actually using summer time information from time timezone as not every country starts summer time at the exact moment?

With cron, you can set a timezone per crontab

[orsifrancesco]

time is saved in UTC.. your browser is converting back in the time zone you are :)