Cron & systemd Timer Recipes Pack v1

Stop googling OnCalendar syntax. This pack gives you 12 production-style recipes, each as a ready .service + .timer pair and the equivalent crontab line:

• Nightly rsync backup · PostgreSQL dump with 14-day retention

• Log compress/cleanup · /tmp cleanup · dated JSON report rotation

• certbot renew with nginx reload · weekly apt refresh · hourly git fast-forward pull

• Disk-space alert · 5-minute HTTP health check

• Weekdays-only 09:00–17:45 every 15 min · user-level (no root) daily timer

Plus:

• [email protected] — webhook alert (Slack/Discord/ntfy) when a job fails, via OnFailure=

• install.sh — one command installs a recipe and enables its timer

• Cron → systemd translation cheat sheet and the 6 gotchas that break most timers

Tested: every unit passes systemd-analyze verify, every schedule checked with systemd-analyze calendar, every script syntax-checked and run on a test box.

MIT licensed. Works on any systemd distro (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch).