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Schedule reports with the cron utility

Use the cron command-line utility to run the Reporting CLI on a schedule. Each cron entry consists of a cron expression that specifies when to run, followed by the command to run.

To learn about the cron expression syntax, see Cron expressions. To get help with cron, open the man page by running the following command:

man crontab

Prerequisites

Specifying the schedule

Cron runs commands with a minimal PATH that usually contains only /usr/bin and /bin, so cron cannot find the node and opensearch-reporting-cli commands unless you set PATH in the crontab. To find the directories that contain these commands, run the following command:

dirname "$(command -v node)" "$(command -v opensearch-reporting-cli)"

Open the crontab editor by running the following command:

crontab -e

In the crontab editor, set PATH to include the directories returned by the preceding command, and then add the report request. The following example generates a report every day at 8:00 AM and sends it by email using Amazon SES:

PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
0 8 * * * opensearch-reporting-cli -u '<dashboards-url>' -e ses -s <sender-email> -r <recipient-email>

Cron converts every % character in a command into a new line, and OpenSearch Dashboards URLs usually contain % characters. Enclose the URL in single quotes and escape each % character in the URL as \%. Alternatively, store the URL in a .env file as described in the following section.

If you specify a file name using the -n option, the Reporting CLI fails on the second run because a file with the same name already exists. Omit the file name to save each report with a timestamped file name, or delete the previous report before the next run.

Storing report settings in a .env file

Instead of providing the URL and other options in the cron command, store them in a .env file. Values in a .env file do not need escaping. Cron runs commands from your home directory, so change to the directory that contains the .env file before running the Reporting CLI.

For example, create a /home/<user>/reports/.env file containing the following variables:

OPENSEARCH_URL="<dashboards-url>"
OPENSEARCH_TRANSPORT=smtp
OPENSEARCH_SMTP_HOST=<smtp-host>
OPENSEARCH_SMTP_PORT=<smtp-port>
OPENSEARCH_FROM=<sender-email>
OPENSEARCH_TO=<recipient-email>

Then add the following entry to the crontab:

PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
0 8 * * * cd /home/<user>/reports && opensearch-reporting-cli

For more information, see Use environment variables with the Reporting CLI.

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