Cronaut

A modern desktop GUI for managing systemd --user timers and the current user's crontab on Debian-based Linux.

Cronaut is local-only — no telemetry, no network calls, no remote endpoints. All state lives under ~/.config/com.alienresidents.cronaut/ and the unit files managed by Cronaut are stored under ~/.config/systemd/user/.

Status: alpha. The scaffold is functional; the UI for creating/editing entries is wired but the create/edit forms are not yet implemented.

Features

• Systemd --user timers — list, enable/disable, run-now, remove. Cronaut marks units it owns with # Managed-By: cronaut and refuses to modify or delete units lacking that marker, so your hand-written units stay safe.
• User crontab — list, toggle (non-destructive disable via # CRONAUT-DISABLED: prefix), remove. Comments, environment variables, and unrecognised lines are preserved verbatim across writes.
• Logs — snapshot or live-tail from journalctl --user, scoped to a unit or to the CRON syslog tag.
• Themable — light / dark / system + 7 accent colours, applied via CSS custom properties.
• Tray with auto-detect — uses XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP to decide whether the desktop has a working StatusNotifierItem host. Falls back to taskbar on GNOME (which doesn't ship a tray by default).

Tech stack

Layer	Choice
Shell	Tauri 2 (Rust backend + system webview)
Frontend	React 19 + TypeScript + Vite + Tailwind CSS 4
Components	Hand-rolled, shadcn-style; Radix primitives where useful
Icons	lucide-react
Persistence	tauri-plugin-store (JSON in the platform config dir)

Building

Prerequisites (Debian / Ubuntu)

sudo apt install -y \
  libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev \
  libsoup-3.0-dev \
  libjavascriptcoregtk-4.1-dev \
  libayatana-appindicator3-dev \
  build-essential curl wget file libssl-dev pkg-config

# Rust toolchain
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

# Node + pnpm
# (use your preferred installer; tested with Node 24, pnpm 10)

Dev

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev

Build a .deb

pnpm tauri build --bundles deb
# ./src-tauri/target/release/bundle/deb/cronaut_0.1.0_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./src-tauri/target/release/bundle/deb/cronaut_*.deb

Project layout

cronaut/
├── src/                          # React frontend
│   ├── components/               # UI primitives + sidebar
│   ├── features/                 # one folder per page
│   │   ├── timers/
│   │   ├── crontab/
│   │   ├── logs/
│   │   ├── settings/
│   │   └── about/
│   └── lib/                      # api wrappers, theme, utils
├── src-tauri/                    # Rust backend
│   └── src/
│       ├── lib.rs                # Tauri Builder + plugin wiring
│       ├── timers.rs             # systemd --user CRUD
│       ├── crontab.rs            # user-crontab CRUD
│       ├── logs.rs               # journalctl streaming
│       ├── tray.rs               # tray icon + close-to-tray
│       ├── desktop_env.rs        # DE detection
│       ├── settings.rs           # typed settings schema
│       └── error.rs              # serializable error type
└── README.md

Privacy

Cronaut never makes network calls. Search the source for reqwest, fetch, http, https:// — the only external URLs are the GitHub project link in the About page (opened via xdg-open, only when you click it).

Roadmap

• Create-timer and create-crontab-entry forms (currently disabled buttons)
• Edit-timer / edit-crontab-entry dialogs
• Cron expression builder UI with human-readable preview
• System cron viewer (/etc/cron.d/*, /etc/crontab) — read-only
• System systemd timers — read-only
• Autostart on login (via tauri-plugin-autostart)
• AppImage and Flatpak bundles
• AppArmor / seccomp profile

License

MIT — see LICENSE.