Question

I’m about to write a script which execute some ruby scripts in a scheduled manner.
Production env: Enterprise’s cluster running debian with restricted permissions for users so I don’t have permissions to edit cron table files. can I use whenever ruby gem?
ruby 1.9.1
Thank you for your answers.

Answer 1

The gem whenever uses the crontab [CRONTAB FILE] to write it’s crontabs. If configured to setup the crontab for another user it uses crontab -u [USER] [CRONTAB FILE]. The following excerpt from lib/whenever/command_line.rb displays how the command is generated.

def write_crontab(contents)
  …
  command = ['crontab']
  command << "-u #{@options[:user]}" if @options[:user]
  command << tmp_cron_file
  …
end

So if the user account which executes the whenever command isn’t able to execute the commands listed above, I’m pretty sure whenever has no way to work as expected.

The user option can be given like this: whenever --user someone.