Creating crontab via Capistrano instead of using crontab -e

Question

I would like to include cron tasks in my Capistrano deployment files instead of using the following command to manually edit the crontab file:

crontab -e [username]

Is there a script I could use within the Capistrano run command to set the contents of the crontab?

Answer 1

On my linux box

crontab -u userName -l > fileName

lists the crontab file for userName in fileName.

Then I would use a ruby (or another language) script to update the file.

Finally I would use

crontab -u userName fileName

to update the crontab for userName