mcp-crontab

This MCP server provides an interface for exploring, explaining, and managing crontab entries. It exposes a set of tools that help you understand cron syntax in plain English, inspect and manipulate your current user’s crontab, and view recent cron-related logs. You can interact with the server through Claude-based clients or any MCP client configured to talk to an MCP server. Core capabilities include explaining expressions, listing and searching entries, adding or removing items, and previewing upcoming runs. The server relies on your system crontab and uses croniter for calculation of future runs, so it operates in the context of the user who runs it.

Typical workflows include: listing current crontab entries to see what’s scheduled, explaining a particular cron expression to understand its timing, computing the next N run times for a given expression, and adding or removing entries with targeted patterns. For troubleshooting, you can fetch recent cron logs (via journalctl or syslog) to correlate cron activity with system events. The provided commands are exposed through the MCP interface as tools like list_crontab, search_crontab, explain_cron_expression, next_runs, and others, each designed to be easy to invoke from conversational prompts.

Prerequisites:

• Python 3.10+
• Linux or macOS (crontab command is used)
• pip install or editable install permissions

Install from source and run:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/jalloway/mcp-crontab-server.git
cd mcp-crontab-server

# Install in editable mode
pip install -e .

# Start the MCP server (as described in the README, via MCP inspector or CLI)
mcp-crontab-server

Alternative development workflow (optional):

# Install development dependencies if needed
pip install -e .[dev]

# Run with MCP inspector for debugging
fastmcp dev src/mcp_crontab_server/server.py

Notes:

• Ensure your environment has access to the system crontab (crontab command).
• If you are using Claude or another MCP client, configure it to point at the uvx-based server command as shown in the Quick Start.

Tips and considerations:

• This server reads and manipulates the current user’s crontab; use with appropriate permissions.
• The cron parser relies on croniter for validation and next-run calculations.
• If you upgrade Python or dependencies, re-run pip install -e . to keep the editable install up to date.
• For troubleshooting, verify that the crontab command is available on the host and that the user has permission to read/write crontab entries.
• Environment variables are not required by default, but you may extend the environment for custom logging or transport options if you modify the server code.