systemd Calendar Timers

Summary

systemd has supported timer units for activating services based on time since its inception. However, it only could schedule services based on monotonic time events (i.e. "every 5 minutes"). With this feature in place systemd also supports calendar time events (i.e. "every monday morning 6:00 am", or "at midnight on every 1st, 2nd, 3rd of each month if that's saturday or sunday").

Owner

Name: Lennart Poettering

Email: lennart at poettering dot net

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 19

Last updated: 2012-01-17

Percentage of completion: 100%

Detailed Description

In timer units you may now use OnCalendar= to express a calendar time event. The syntax is quite flexible and in some ways more powerful than cron's (and certainly more readable). For a more detailed discussion of the syntax see the documentation.

Benefit to Fedora

A powerful way to trigger systemd services on calendar time.

Scope

Only needs changes in systemd upstream.

How To Test

Write a calendar time event unit and run it. See if it activates!

User Experience

Nothing really changes. It's a feature for people who want to schedule services based on calendar time events, nobody else will even notice.

Dependencies

Nothing.

Contingency Plan

Nothing. It doesn't affect anybody who doesn't use this.

Documentation

Release Notes

It should be enough to just announce availability of this feature, plus a paste from the Summary section of this feature page, plus maybe a reference to the the docs for this.