JSON Data Format

Introduction

The configuration settings are stored in JSON format. There’s one exception: we support comments in the form of //. Everything after // will be ignored.

You can read more about the format used by reading the Persistent Pineapple documentation [3].

General Options

• log-file-mode: The mode passed to open; You probably want to use “a”
• log-file-level: The string-based logging.level for the log file (e.g. “DEBUG”)
• log-file-formatter: See the Python documentation [1]
• screen-formatter: See the Python documentation [1]
• vars: Any variable expansions for the jobs (see Variables)
• jobs: See below

Variables

Each job has the ability to include variables in the command. This allows you to set environment-variable-like parameters in a common section. This is the vars section in the General Options.

vars is a dictionary, where the keys are the text to search for in command (w/o % symbols), and the values are what to replace the variable with. It is strongly recommened that you use a constant character to mark the variable. For example, surround the text with % (e.g. “%PYTHON%”: “c:/Python27/bin/python.exe”). This will make the expansion more likely to succeed and not cause any problems.

The variables are case-sensitive. “%PYTHON%” is not the same as “%python%”.

Jobs

jobs is a list of dictionaries that describe each job you want to run. Each job can contain the following keys:

• description: A string description of the job
• cron-job: The crontab entry. See Josiah Carlson’s documentation [2]
• command: The command you want to run
• working-dir: The directory you want to run the command in

Example

Here’s a sample configuration file:

{
    // Logging options /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
    "log-file-mode": "a",
    "log-file-level": "DEBUG",

    // https://docs.python.org/2/library/logging.html#logrecord-attributes
    "log-file-formatter": "%(asctime)s - %(filename)s:%(lineno)d - %(levelname)s - %(message)s",
    "screen-formatter": "%(asctime)s - %(filename)s:%(lineno)d - %(levelname)s - %(message)s",
    ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

    // Variable Expansion //////////////////////////////////////////////////
    "vars": {
        "%PYTHON%": "C:/Python27/python2.7.exe"
    },

    "jobs": [
        {
            "description": "glacier backup: documents",
            "cron-job": "@weekly",
            "command": "glacier-sync.exe glacier z:/documents us-west-2 documents nckhs",
            "working-dir": "c:/Program Files/FastGlacier"
        },
        {
            "description": "ccleaner",
            //           M   H   DA   MON    DOW     Y
            "cron-job": "0   0    *    *     */2     *",
            "command": "CCleaner.exe /AUTO",
            "working-dir": "C:/Program Files/CCleaner"
        }
    ]
}

[1]	(1, 2) https://docs.python.org/2/library/logging.html#logrecord-attributes

[2]	https://github.com/josiahcarlson/parse-crontab

[3]	https://github.com/JasonAUnrein/Persistent-Pineapple