Creating crontab task in puppet using a cron expression

Question

I'm trying to create a crontab task using Puppet. Problem is puppet is asking you to set parameters like "hour", "minute", "month", etc, to define at which moment the tasks have to be executed. I can't find a parameter using a cron expression, for example "*/5 * * * *" or "15 6 * * 1". Is there any way to do that?

Answer 1

Here is what I finally wrote:

#In my parameters, so I can pass the array using Foreman, for example
Array $cron_jobs = [['58 7 * * *', '/eloi/ksh/eloi-batch/scripts/purgeRepertoireLogTrace.ksh >/dev/null 2>&1', 'purgeRepertoireLogTrace'], ['*/5 * * * *',
  '/eloi/ksh/eloi-batch/scripts/replicationReferentielFichier.ksh >/dev/null 2>&1', 'replicationReferentielFichier']],

...

$cron_jobs.each |$cron_job| {
    $cron_expr = split($cron_job[0], ' ')

    cron{ "cron-${cron_job[2]}":
      command     => "${cron_job[1]}",
      minute      => "${cron_expr[0]}",
      hour        => "${cron_expr[1]}",
      monthday    => "${cron_expr[2]}",
      month       => "${cron_expr[3]}",
      weekday     => "${cron_expr[4]}",
      user        => "${appuser[0]}",
      environment => "PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin",
    }
  }

Using the split function, I'm able to convert the cron expression from the table into a parameters for a Puppet cron resource.

I could put the whole cron string in a single dimension array, but some of my commands contain spaces, so it wouldn't work properly. It also gives me the opportunity to add another field to build the resource name.