This is the rest of what #4957 asked for -- run Perl, PHP, bash and binaries
on a flexible schedule, from a visual interface -- and it needs no daemon,
because cron is the daemon. 1.39.37 already taught ZoneMinder to rewrite a
marked block in the web user's crontab for scheduled monitor actions while
leaving every line outside that block alone. A CronJobs row is another line in
the same block.
So the parts that would otherwise have to be written and then supervised --
timing, catch-up, restart on boot, running as a known user -- are cron's, and
have been since 1975. What ZoneMinder adds is the table, the page, and the
rule that the crontab is a projection of the table: rebuilt whenever a row
changes, never the other way round, so the two cannot drift.
The schedule uses the same pickers the monitor actions got, reading "Every
Monday at 7pm", with the cron field beside them for anything the pickers
cannot say. The pickers build the spec in the browser so the field fills in as
you choose, and the server builds and validates it again on save, because the
browser is not what keeps a crontab line honest. The two mappings are checked
against each other in tests/js/cron-schedule.test.js, which reads the PHP map
rather than restating it.
The command is not judged on what it does; running things is the point. It is
judged on whether it stays on its own line and means in cron what the operator
meant: a newline is refused because it would end the entry and let the rest
become a line with a schedule of its own, and an unescaped % is refused
because cron stops the command there and feeds the remainder in as stdin,
which would silently run less than was typed. Cron's own escape, \%, is
accepted.
Editing takes System edit rights, and every add, change and delete is logged
with the command. Anyone who can edit here can run commands as the web user,
which is worth saying plainly -- though it is the same trust Filters'
AutoExecuteCmd has carried for years, not a new one.
ServerId NULL means every server writes the job into its own crontab, which
is what a single server install wants without having to say so; naming a
server restricts it to that one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five cron fields are a reasonable thing to store and an unreasonable thing to
put in front of an operator. The editor now reads as the sentence it means:
Every [day v] at [08:00]
Every [Monday v] at [19:00]
Every [weekday (Mon-Fri) v] at [07:30]
Cron stays the stored form, because it is what goes in the crontab and it can
say things the two controls cannot. cronFromParts turns what the editor
collected into a spec and cronToParts turns one back, so a saved schedule
loads into the same controls that made it.
cronToParts is deliberately partial. A spec the controls cannot draw -- every
fifteen minutes, the first of the month, hourly, a pair of weekdays -- comes
back null, and the editor shows it as it stands and saves it back untouched
through a read-only field. Rounding someone's schedule to the nearest thing
the pickers understand would be worse than admitting the editor cannot draw
it.
The time comes from <input type="time">, so it is shown in whatever format
the operator's locale uses; 8am and 08:00 are the same control. The schedule
is still built and validated server side, since the browser is not what keeps
a crontab line honest.
Tested for the round trip over every frequency and a spread of times: what
the editor can build must survive being saved and loaded back, or editing a
row would quietly change when it runs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
that already exist -- lights on, lights off, play a sound -- at set times.
MonitorActions already says what to do and to which device, with triggers for
EventStart, Alarm, Manual and so on. So this adds a trigger rather than a
subsystem: an action whose TriggerOn is 'Schedule' carries a five field cron
spec, and cron runs it.
Cron, rather than a daemon of our own, because the web user owns a crontab it
can rewrite without privilege, and because the line cron runs,
30 22 * * * /usr/bin/zmcontrol.pl --id 24 --command=lightOff
is the same invocation web/includes/Monitor.php already falls back to when no
zmcontrol daemon is listening. A scheduled action therefore takes the path a
manual one does rather than a parallel one of its own. It also means no new
code runs as root, nothing new has to be supervised, and the feature is a
table column plus a crontab block.
Nothing a form can set reaches a shell. The schedule is refused unless
cronScheduleIsValid() accepts it -- five fields, numbers and the usual
*/,-/ only, with newline, carriage return and % rejected outright because
each would end the line or the command. The command itself comes from
MonitorAction::commandFor()'s fixed list and the ids are integers, so the
whole line is assembled from constrained parts. That is a narrower surface
than Filters.AutoExecuteCmd, which has taken an arbitrary command for years.
The crontab is not ours to own, so ZoneMinder rewrites only a block between
two markers and leaves every other line byte for byte. A block whose end
marker is missing, which is what an interrupted write leaves, is treated as
no block at all rather than swallowing everything after it: losing our own
stale block is the safe failure, losing the admin's entries is not. The block
is rebuilt from the table on every save, so the crontab is a projection of
the database rather than a second place to keep the truth.
zmc recognises the new trigger and skips it, so having one does not warn on
every reload, and nothing fires a scheduled action from the capture process.
An action targeting a monitor on another server is left out and logged: cron
runs zmcontrol.pl locally, and the web ui's proxy through the API has no cron
equivalent. Single server installs are unaffected.
The two pieces that can lose data or run the wrong thing are pure, and
tests/php/test_crontab.php covers them: schedule validation including the
injection cases, and splicing a block in, out and over without disturbing the
lines around it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
