Every project should be monitored. It’s common sense. We all know it. We’re all sensible developers. What is constructed must eventually fall, and without monitoring, we won’t know when or how to fix it.

And yet thousands of projects go without logging or monitoring, working fine until they don’t, preventably depressing countless others.

Cronfed is a Python package that embodies a **Minimum Viable Monitoring **mindset. Something is better than nothing, and there are far too many cron jobs with nothing. Whether lazy or busy, take 5 minutes and clear your conscience.

pip install cronfed

echo ”*/15 * * * * /usr/bin/python -m cronfed --output /var/www/mysite/assets/cronfed.rss /var/mail/myuser 2>&1 | tee -a /home/myuser/project/logs/cronfed.txt”

Just replace “myuser”, the “mysite” path, and the “logs” with the appropriate paths and you’ll be ready to point your feedreader or IFTTT at your site and commence breathing easier. Learn more on the Cronfed docs. (Or a bigger example crontab and output.)

If only all solutions were this easy and consequence-free.

We use Cronfed for Hatnote’s Recent Changes Map and Weeklypedia (which just turned 1! You should sign up, learn about Wikipedia, and experience the reliability firsthand!). Predictably, we are all very satisfied with a simple tool that does one job well.

