macOS How to Create a Cron Job on macOS?

[S.B.G]

I'm still searching around the Internet on how to do this, but I want to ask here, too.

I've setup a Raspberry Pi to run a Mediawiki on the LAN. I also wanted to figure out how to backup said Raspberry Pi as well. I was able to successfully run a backup over the network from the Pi to the Mac mini as outlined in this post using rsync.

The backup job:

From Terminal I executed this code to sync the folder on the Raspberry Pi to the Mac.

rsync -avz -e ssh pi@10.0.1.84:/var/www/html/mediawiki/ MediaWikiBU/

Now I want to automate that backup process and I assume cron is the appropriate method to do it, but I haven't figured that part out yet.

The Mac mini is on the latest version of Mojave.

 

[chrfr]

I'm still searching around the Internet on how to do this, but I want to ask here, too.

I've setup a Raspberry Pi to run a Mediawiki on the LAN. I also wanted to figure out how to backup said Raspberry Pi as well. I was able to successfully run a backup over the network from the Pi to the Mac mini as outlined in this post using rsync.

The backup job:


Now I want to automate that backup process and I assume cron is the appropriate method to do it, but I haven't figured that part out yet.

The Mac mini is on the latest version of Mojave.

Launchd is really the preferred way to schedule events on macOS. This is a good basic overview: http://www.launchd.info

 

[S.B.G]

Launchd is really the preferred way to schedule events on macOS. This is a good basic overview: http://www.launchd.info

Ok, that led me to find out that I could do this as a workflow with Automater. Trying to setup an AppleScript and its stopping me at authentication. The user name and password are indeed correct.

on run {input, parameters}
    do shell script "rsync -avz -e ssh pi@10.0.1.84:/var/www/html/mediawiki/ MediaWikiBU/" user name "pi" password "NotMyRealPassword" with administrator privileges
    return input
end run

 

[chown33]

Ok, that led me to find out that I could do this as a workflow with Automater. Trying to setup an AppleScript and its stopping me at authentication. The user name and password are indeed correct.

on run {input, parameters}
    do shell script "rsync -avz -e ssh pi@10.0.1.84:/var/www/html/mediawiki/ MediaWikiBU/" user name "pi" password "NotMyRealPassword" with administrator privileges
    return input
end run

View attachment 806454

I'm not sure I understand why you've got admin privileges there. That AppleScript feature is for running with admin priviliges on the Mac, i.e. using your Mac's admin account. You don't typically need admin privileges to login to another host (the Pi). If you do, then you need to supply the password on that host, which may differ from the password on the Mac originating the connection.


Another thought that comes to mind: is the Mac-resident user named "pi" a member of the sudoers group? That is, can you login to your Mac as "pi", and then run commands with 'sudo'? Because I'm almost certain that the "with admin privileges" feature of AppleScript is connected in some way to 'sudo' or the sudoers group. The 'admin' or 'wheel' groups are other possibilities.

The file that controls 'sudo' is /private/etc/sudoers. It's protected by default, so you'll need admin privileges to read it:

sudo cat /private/etc/sudoers

 

[superscape]

Whilst the above posters are 100% right about launchd being the way to go, if you're really intent on using cron then maybe take a look at Cronnix.

https://code.google.com/archive/p/cronnix/downloads