Scheduled

We expect to see the latest email summaries every morning, so we need an automated scheduling task to achieve this goal.

Using crontab

To fully automate this process, we utilize the crontab feature of Linux to set up scheduled tasks.

This ensures that the program runs automatically at a fixed time every day, fetching new emails, generating summaries, and updating the GitHub repository.

The specific crontab configuration is as follows:

crontab -e

Then add the following content:

# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
#
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
#
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').
#
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
#
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h  dom mon dow   command

# Define your environment variables
OPENAI_API_KEY="your_openai_api_key"

# Automatically execute the update script every morning at 6
0 6 * * * /path/to/your/script/update_targets_infos.sh

Before setting up scheduled tasks, don't forget to grant execution permissions to the script files:

chmod +x /path/to/your/script/update_targets_infos.sh

Additionally, due to the specific environment of crontab, you must ensure that the Python environment and related packages being executed are correct.

Therefore, in the program, we typically use absolute paths to execute Python scripts. Remember to modify the paths in the program.

# `update_targets_infos.sh`

# ...omitting above

# Execute Python program, replace this with your own python path
$HOME/your/python main.py --project_name $project_name --time_length 1 2>&1

# ...omitting below

tip

Crontab does not read your .bashrc or .bash_profile files, so you need to specify all environment variables in the program.

This is also why we set the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable in the crontab execution program.

Testing crontab

So, after completing the setup, how can you test the automated tasks based on the crontab environment?

One feasible method is: start a new terminal, remove all environment variables, and then execute the program.

env -i HOME=$HOME OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_api_key /bin/bash --noprofile --norc

# Then execute the program
/path/to/your/script/update_targets_infos.sh

By running the program from this terminal, you can see how the program behaves in the crontab environment.