When it comes to Docker containers, even a simple task can be pretty confusing, like the cron jobs. I know it was confusing for me at least. And I had to spent a lot of time scratching my head because my cron job just won’t start.

Backstory Link to heading

Before we dive into how to setup the cron daemon to work with Docker containers, let’s look into a problem I ran into AFTER setting up the cron in Docker, in Kubernetes running on Google Container Engine. This will be particulary helpful to those who managed to setup cron in the container, but the job is not starting.

So, I was playing around with Docker and Kubernetes in Google Cloud, I wanted to setup a cron to do an ansible-pull every 10 minute. I managed to setup everything, the cron daemon is running in the foreground and all is well. Well, except that the job is not starting. I tried all different combinations, like tried using the crontab /path/to/file command, tried putting the job in /etc/cron.d/job-name. None of them worked.

Finally, I installed rsyslog in the container to see what the heck is going on. If you are wondering on how to do it, this is how I did it.

Get a shell in the container running in Kubernetes

kubectl exec -it nginx-g435x bash

You will have to replace nginx-g435x with your container ID. Then,

apt-get update && apt-get install rsyslog

I took a look at /var/log/syslog and there it is

Jul  8 18:32:01 nginx-g435x cron[101]: (*system*) NUMBER OF HARD LINKS > 1 (/etc/crontab)
Jul  8 18:32:01 nginx-g435x cron[101]: (*system*ansible-pull) NUMBER OF HARD LINKS > 1 (/etc/cron.d/ansible-pull)

So the cron is complaining that the /etc/crontab and /etc/cron.d/ansible-pull files containing the cron jobs are layered hard links. Well of course it is, because it is docker and that’s how it works. There is a debian bug reported with it HERE if you are interested. Anyway, I was able to fix it, and I’ll explain that down below.

How to get cron working in Docker Link to heading

To explain things easily and avoid as much as technical jargon, we’ll use an example to see how to do it.

So, in this example, we will have a container running nginx and cron. That’s it. It is a simple container. We will be using s6-overlay as the process supervisor ( which will start and keep an eye on our nginx and cron processes )

Create a file crontab with the cron job

$ cat crontab
* * * * * root /bin/date >> /tmp/date.log

It’s a simple cron that will write to the file /tmp/date.log the current date and time, every minute. You can replace it with whatever job you want.

Here is the Dockerfile

# The base image is Ubuntu 16.04
FROM ubuntu:16.04

# Get the s6-overlay package
ADD https://github.com/just-containers/s6-overlay/releases/download/v1.11.0.1/s6-overlay-amd64.tar.gz /tmp/

# Extract the scripts to the root of the container
RUN tar xzf /tmp/s6-overlay-amd64.tar.gz -C /

# Install nginx and make sure it runs in the foreground
RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get install -y nginx && \
    echo "daemon off;" >> /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

ADD crontab /etc/cron.d/ansible-pull
RUN chmod 0600 /etc/cron.d/ansible-pull

COPY ./services.d /etc/services.d

ENTRYPOINT ["/init"]
CMD []

That is all for our Dockerfile. Now we need to create a directory services.d in the same directory as the Dockefile Inside the services.d directory, create two directories named cron and nginx. Inside them, create a file named run and finish.

This is how the entire thing looks like

$ tree
.
├── Dockerfile
├── crontab
├── services.d
│   ├── cron
│   │   └── run
│   └── nginx
│       ├── finish
│       └── run

The file run tells how to start the service and finish tells what to do when a service exits. Let’s take a look at the content of each of these run files

$ cat services.d/cron/run
#!/usr/bin/with-contenv sh

# this line here is what we should have to get rid of the hard link error
touch /etc/crontab /etc/cron.*/*

exec cron -f

$ cat services.d/nginx/run
#!/usr/bin/with-contenv sh

exec nginx

Basically, these run scripts just starts the services in the foreground. Should something happen to these services and they exit, the s6-overlay will start them back.

If you want the container to exit when one of the process is exited, you should create the finish file. Like below

$ cat services.d/nginx/finish
#!/usr/bin/execlineb -S0

s6-svscanctl -t /var/run/s6/services

What this does is, if the nginx process exits due to an error, the entire container will exit so that we know something’s up and we can take a look at. If you don’t want the container to exit during an error, just don’t put the finish file.

And that’s it. This is how you run cron and another service in the same container ( and have cron do its job )