fkconsultin/asparagus repository overview

⁠Asparagus

⁠A simple and pluggable cron scheduler for distributed systems.

Asparagus is an open source task scheduler with no external dependencies. It's useful for executing scheduled tasks on any environment.

⁠Features

• Variety of Source Providers⁠, ranging from standard crontab to etcd based backends.
• Multiple Execution Providers⁠, including HTTP and local execution.
• Simple to install and manage, and easy to get started.
• Monitoring and reporting is a key priority.
• Retry and Backoff strategies.

⁠Installation

We recommend using Asparagus with our pre-built Docker image. Start Asparagus using:

# Crontab Backend
docker pull fkconsultin/asparagus

docker run \
  --rm -ti \
  -v $(pwd)/example:/app \
  -e ASPARAGUS_SCHEDULER_PROVIDER_CRONTAB_SOURCE=/app/crontab \
  fkconsultin/asparagus

⁠How it works

  -------------------                                         ----------------------
  | Source Provider | \                                     / | Execution Provider |
  -------------------  \                                   /  ----------------------
                        > - - - Asparagus Scheduler - - - <
  -------------------  /                |                  \  ----------------------
  | Source Provider | /                 |                   \ | Execution Provider |
  -------------------                   |                     ----------------------
                                ---------------------
                                | Metrics Reporting |
                                ---------------------

Source Providers provide configuration and crontab settings to asparagus. Asparagus uses the configured Execution Provider to execute the actual cronjob on the target system.

⁠Configuration

⁠Global configuration

Configuration is done using environment variables or a central config file. You can generate a sample configuration file by using the following command:

docker run --rm -ti fkconsultin/asparagus config > conf/asparagus.conf

Now you can start your asparagus instance using the provided volume: /etc/asparagus using the asparagus.conf filename:

docker run --rm -ti -v $(pwd)/conf:/etc/asparagus fkconsultin/asparagus

Alternatively you can use prefixed environment variables for each configuration variable, like so:

ASPARAGUS_<SECTION>_<KEY>=<VALUE>

Read the annotated documentation if you want to find out more: here⁠

⁠Source Providers

Source providers define where cronjobs can be discovered. To find out more read this⁠ article.

⁠Execution Providers

Execution providers execute whatever was defined inside a cronjob. To find out more read this⁠ article.

⁠Contributing

If you're feeling adventurous and want to contribute to Aspragus, see our contributing doc⁠ for info on how to make feature requests, build from source, and run tests.