DDEV Supercronic

A DDEV add-on that runs scheduled cron jobs in the web container using Supercronic.

Unlike the system cron daemon, Supercronic inherits the full container environment — DDEV variables like IS_DDEV_PROJECT, database credentials, and TYPO3_CONTEXT are automatically available to every job without any inline exports.

Installation

ddev add-on get astehlik/ddev-supercronic
ddev restart

Usage

Add one or more *.cron files to .ddev/web-build/. Each file uses standard crontab syntax (no username column).

On ddev start, all .ddev/web-build/*.cron files are concatenated into a single crontab and executed by Supercronic inside the web container.

An example job is provided at .ddev/web-build/time.cron.example. Rename it to activate it:

mv .ddev/web-build/time.cron.example .ddev/web-build/time.cron
ddev restart

After at least a minute, ./time.log should appear in your project root containing the current time written by the example job.

Examples

Because Supercronic inherits the container environment, IS_DDEV_PROJECT and similar variables do not need to be set explicitly in cron files.

TYPO3 scheduler

* * * * * cd /var/www/html && vendor/bin/typo3 scheduler:run

Feel free to contribute own working examples for other systems.

Debugging

• Use crontab guru to build schedule expressions.
• Inspect the active crontab with ddev exec cat /etc/supercronic/crontab.
• Connect to the web container with ddev ssh to run commands manually.
• To run jobs on local time instead of UTC, set timezone in .ddev/config.yaml.

Migrating from ddev-cron

This add-on is a drop-in replacement for ddev/ddev-cron. Both use the same .ddev/web-build/*.cron file format and location, so existing cron files work without any changes.

ddev add-on remove ddev/ddev-cron
ddev add-on get astehlik/ddev-supercronic
ddev restart

Because Supercronic inherits the full container environment, any IS_DDEV_PROJECT=true or other explicit env var prefixes in your cron commands are no longer necessary, though leaving them in place is harmless.

Removal

ddev add-on remove astehlik/ddev-supercronic

Versioning

The add-on version tracks the Supercronic version it ships. A GitHub Actions workflow checks for new Supercronic releases every Monday and opens a pull request with the update.