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swarm-scheduler

Many solutions out there explain how to run cron tasks using docker. However, none of them does that in a distributed manner and make use of the swarm mode orchestration. With swarm-scheduler, you can do that with additional benefits.

Each time a task is run, it is scheduled on an arbitrary node. Moreover, resource reservations and/or limitations can be applied on tasks according to the needs. Tasks also run inside any container image, let it be ruby, python, php, ...etc or even an application specific image. No new syntax to learn, just use the docker compose file syntax.

Here are the steps required to achieve this:

1. Deploy the cron stack

First thing to do is to write a docker stack yaml file describing your cron tasks as explained in the introduction. An example file is located here with the name cron-services-example.yml. You can include any configuration as long as you abide with the following restrictions:

  1. Set command to run the task command.
  2. replicas should be set to 0, otherwise the task will run as soon as the service is deployed for the number of times you specified.
  3. Set restart_policy.condition to none. If you set to on-failure, the task will restart automatically on failure. If set to any (default), it will continuously restart. Both cases are typically not needed in cron tasks.

Once ready, deploy your cron stack on the swarm cluster:

docker stack deploy -c cron-stack-example.yml cron

2. Deploy the crontab schedule

A standard crontab file is used to schedule the tasks. The only requirement is to set the cron task command to launch the corresponding service. For example if you defined a service called service1 in the cron stack, and you want to run it once every minute, your crontab file should look like:

* * * * * root run-task cron_service1

Once ready, deploy your crontab file as a docker config:

docker config create crontab.v1 crontab-example

3. Deploy the scheduler

With everything in place, it is time to deploy the scheduler itself and start the action:

docker service create --name scheduler_manager \
    --mount type=bind,source=/var/run/docker.sock,target=/var/run/docker.sock \
    --env DOCKER_URL=unix:///var/run/docker.sock \
    --config source=crontab.v1,target=/crontab \
    --constraint node.role==manager \
    rayyanqcri/swarm-scheduler

Alternatively, clone this repo then deploy the stack scheduler-service.yml:

docker stack deploy -c scheduler-service.yml scheduler

Watch the service logs

One of the benefits of running cron tasks as docker services is that you can see the output of the tasks using docker logs. With our example, and the service name is service1:

docker service logs cron_service1

Updating the crontab or the cron stack

If you need to modify your cron tasks defined in the cron stack above, use docker service update ... to update the existing cron services and docker service create ... to add new cron services.

Alternatively, just remove the cron stack and add it again with the modified file:

docker stack rm cron
docker stack deploy -c modified-cron-stack.yml cron

If what you need is just to change the cron schedule, create a newer version for the docker config.

docker config create crontab.v2 crontab-example-modified && \
docker service update \
    --config-add source=crontab.v2,target=crontab \
    --config-rm crontab.v1 \
    scheduler_manager && \
docker config rm crontab.v1