Window Crontab

A small Windows tray app that runs commands on a schedule.

Schedule any command using classic 5-field cron syntax. Window Crontab lives in your system tray, fires the job at the right minute, captures output to a per-job log, and stays out of your way.

Why

Windows Task Scheduler exists, but it's heavy, hard to script, and the UI is from 2003. Window Crontab is the small thing in the tray that runs your npm run cron every five minutes without a 12-step wizard.

It is one 3 MB executable. No background service, no daemon, no Node, no Python. Just an exe.

Quick start

1. Download crontab.exe from the Releases page.
2. Run it. It drops into your system tray.
3. Open the window (click the tray icon, or double-click). Hit + New job.
4. Fill in a name, a cron schedule, and a command. Save.
5. Watch runs land on the Logs tab.

To autostart with Windows itself: Settings, then "Start with Windows (hidden in tray)".

Features

Scheduling

• Classic 5-field cron (* * * * *) plus @hourly, @daily, @weekly, @monthly
• Live "next run in 2h 14m" preview as you type the schedule
• Hot-reload of the config TOML. Edit it in any editor, changes pick up at the next minute boundary
• Master pause toggle in the tray and sidebar

Per-job options

• Timeout: kill the child if it runs longer than N seconds
• Auto-disable after N runs (useful for one-shot or capped retries)
• Skip if the previous run is still alive (default), or opt into concurrent runs
• Run once when Window Crontab launches

Logs and output

• Per-job append-only log file at %LOCALAPPDATA%\claude-cron\data\logs\<job>.log
• "View output" button on every card opens that log in Notepad
• In-app Logs tab with status (ok, fail, timeout, skipped) and exit code
• Run history persists across restarts

UI

• Light and dark themes, persisted across launches
• Search and filter on the jobs list
• Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+N new job, Ctrl+W or Esc hide window, 1 2 3 switch tabs
• Hide on close, autostart on login (registers HKCU\...\Run with --hidden)

Cron syntax

Standard 5-field: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week.

Want	Schedule
Every minute	* * * * *
Every 15 minutes	*/15 * * * *
Every hour at :00	0 * * * *
Daily at 9:00	0 9 * * *
Weekdays at 9:00	0 9 * * 1-5
Mondays at 8:00	0 8 * * 1
Daily at midnight (alias)	@daily

The form has chips for the common ones. Click to fill.

Command tips

Commands run via cmd /C <your-command> from the app's working directory (typically C:\Windows\System32). For project-relative scripts, cd first:

cd C:\path\to\project && npm run cron

A .bat script is the no-deps option:

"C:\Users\you\scripts\backup.bat"

File locations

What	Path
Config (hot-reloaded)	%APPDATA%\claude-cron\config\crontab.toml
Per-job logs	%LOCALAPPDATA%\claude-cron\data\logs\<sanitized-name>.log
Run history (Logs tab)	%LOCALAPPDATA%\claude-cron\data\history.json

Build from source

cargo build --release
# binary at target\release\crontab.exe

For the MSI installer:

cargo install tauri-cli --locked
cargo tauri build
# msi at target\release\bundle\msi\

Build deps are stock Rust plus the image crate (used by build.rs to generate icons on first build). No Node, no npm, no Tailwind compile step.

How it works

The Rust side runs a single scheduler thread that wakes once per minute, reads the in-memory config, and fires anything matching the current minute. Each fired job spawns its own thread which runs cmd /C <command> with stdout and stderr piped to the per-job log file.

The frontend is plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript talking to Rust through Tauri's invoke bridge. No bundler, no framework. CSS uses native variables for theming. Tauri 2 embeds the assets into the exe at build time.

WebView2 is used for rendering. It ships with Windows 11 and is installed via Edge on Windows 10.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.