cronpan

A cron job monitor for humans. See your jobs, their logs, and toggle them on/off — no daemon, no database, no config files. Your crontab is the source of truth.

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Install

pipx install cronpan

Or with pip:

pip install cronpan

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Run

cronpan

Opens at http://localhost:7878. On a headless machine (VM, server) it won't try to open a browser — just visit the URL from your own machine at http://your-server-ip:7878.

Change the port:

cronpan 9000
cronpan --port 9000

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Keep it running (Linux / VM)

To run cronpan as a background service that starts on boot:

cronpan --install-service

This writes a systemd unit file to /tmp/cronpan.service and prints the exact commands to install it:

sudo cp /tmp/cronpan.service /etc/systemd/system/cronpan.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable cronpan
sudo systemctl start cronpan

The sudo commands require root because writing to /etc/systemd/system/ is a privileged operation. cronpan itself runs as your regular user — no root needed at runtime.

To stop and remove the service:

sudo systemctl stop cronpan
sudo systemctl disable cronpan
sudo rm /etc/systemd/system/cronpan.service

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Logging

cronpan can capture output from your cron jobs into daily log files at ~/.cronlogs/.

Click enable logging on any job in the UI. It wraps the command with a logger script that timestamps each line of output.

Log files are organized as:

~/.cronlogs/
  job_name/
    20260310.log
    20260311.log

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Crontab conventions

cronpan reads and writes your real crontab. It uses comments to store display names:

#[DESCRIPTION] My Job Name
* * * * * /path/to/script.py

Disabled jobs are prefixed:

#[DISABLED] * * * * * /path/to/script.py

Deleted jobs are kept but hidden:

#[DELETED] * * * * * /path/to/script.py

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Docker (for testing)

docker build -t cronpan .
docker run -p 7878:7878 cronpan