Cron Tasks Guide

Using config.yml from deployment-tool, you can configure the system to schedule jobs using Cron. This can be useful to perform election tasks such as:

• Starting/Stopping an election at a certain time.
• Tallying an election at a certain time.
• For elections with progressive tallies, updating the result with certain frequency.

Schedule starting an election

In this example we schedule a server to start an election (with id 4) at a specific time by using the admin.py tool from the ballot-box project. Edit the config.crontab_tasks variable in the config.yml file of the web server with this configuration:

  crontab_tasks:
  - name: start-election
    # job is the command to be run. The command should not contain line
    # breaks.
    job: 'bash -c "source /home/ballotbox/tenv/bin/activate; /home/ballotbox/ballot-box/admin/admin.py auth_start 4 >> /home/ballotbox/crontab.log 2>&1"'
    # The specific user whose crontab should be modified.
    user: 'ballotbox'
    # minute when the job should run ( 0-59, *, */2, etc )
    minute: 0
    # hour when the job should run ( 0-23, *, */2, etc )
    hour: 15
    # Day of the month the job should run ( 1-31, *, */2, etc )
    day: '17'
    # day of the week that the job should run ( 0-6 for Sunday-Saturday, *, etc )
    weekday: '*'
    # Month of the year the job should run ( 1-12, *, */2, etc )
    month: '9'

Ensure that the line - import_tasks: crontab.yml in the playbook.yml file is uncommented. Then deploy the configuration with ansible:

    date; time unbuffer ansible-playbook -i inventory playbook.yml -vvvv 2>&1 | tee log.txt; date

Tally an election every 5 minutes

In this example the web server will be tallying an election every 5 minutes, to update the results as new votes are cast.

First you need to enable progressive tallying. This means you'll be able to perform multiple tallies for the same election. Every time a new tally is performed, the data from the previous tally will be erased. Progressive tallying is required for certain types of elections, but be aware of its security implications.

The first step is to set the config.enable_multiple_tallies variable in the config.yml file to True and deploy this configuration in the master web server and all authorities.

Then you also need to add a cron task to the config.yml file in the master web server. In this case the election id is 34562754 and it has two children elections 34562755,34562756. The task will run every 5 minutes and you can read the log at /home/ballotbox/crontab.log.

  crontab_tasks:
  - name: progressive-tally
    # job is the command to be run. The command should not contain line
    # breaks.
    job: 'bash -c "source /home/ballotbox/tenv/bin/activate; /home/ballotbox/ballot-box/admin/admin.py --children-election-ids 34562755,34562756 --force-tally force-all --mode active trigger_tally 34562754 >> /home/ballotbox/crontab.log 2>&1"'
    # The specific user whose crontab should be modified.
    user: 'ballotbox'
    # minute when the job should run ( 0-59, *, */2, etc )
    minute: '*/5' 
    # hour when the job should run ( 0-23, *, */2, etc )
    hour: '*'
    # Day of the month the job should run ( 1-31, *, */2, etc )
    day: '*'
    # day of the week that the job should run ( 0-6 for Sunday-Saturday, *, etc )
    weekday: '*'
    # Month of the year the job should run ( 1-12, *, */2, etc )
    month: '*'