macschedule

macschedule provides a CLI to generate launchd agents for automating jobs on MacOS quickly from simple, readable yaml configuration files.

Background

Running automated scripts and jobs on MacOS is usually done using cron or more recently launchd. The latter has several advantages and is now the recommended approach from Apple. However, for scheduling simple python or bash scripts it can be tedious to manually create the required .plist files, copy them to the ~/Library/LaunchAgents directory, and start and monitor the services.

Therefore, this CLI allows you to:

• Write simple yaml files to define your jobs and store them anywhere you want. Some flexibility in launchd is intentionally dropped to make these configurations quick and readable.
• Batch autogenerate all the .plist files and directly move them to the user LaunchAgents directory as required.
• Start, stop and monitor all your jobs. This is batch wrapper over launchctl.
• Quickly check logs from launchd. By default this CLI adds output files for stdout and stderr to improve debugging.

Usage

Generate .plist files from all configurations stored in a folder call "jobs":

# test output before copying to LaunchAgents
msch generate --dry-run jobs/*
# if everything looks good
msch generate jobs/*

Load all the jobs that were just generated:

msch load jobs/*

Unload all the jobs that were just generated:

msch unload jobs/*

Print the tail of the logs from the given jobs:

# stdout logs
msch logs --stream=stdout --tail=10 jobs/*
# stderr logs
msch logs --stream=stderr --tail=10 jobs/*

Cleanup and remove the .plist files that were generated in the first step:

# check what will be deleted
msch remove --dry-run jobs/*
# if everything looks good delete the files
msch remove jobs/*

Get help:

msch --help

See /examples/ for example job configurations and their generated .plist files.

More information

A launchd tutorial and documentation is available here.