Recurring tasks

A tool to periodically send myself emails of recurring tasks. A calendar app would also do this, but having recurring tasks in version control is something I wanted and writing this was quite fun.

This little utility is something I wrote for myself in Rust. It's split into two parts: a public repo and a private repo. The public repo contains executable that when run will read a file called tasks.toml and generate a subject.txt and body.html output.

The tasks.toml file will looks something like this:

timezone = "America/Toronto"
#                  ┌───────────── sec (0 - 59)
#                  │ ┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)
#                  │ │ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)
#                  │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the month (1 - 31)
#                  │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12 or JAN-DEC)
#                  │ │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the week (0 - 6 or SUN-SAT)
#                  │ │ │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── year
#                  │ │ │ │ │ │ │
#                  │ │ │ │ │ │ │
#                  * * * * * * *

[tasks.recycling_green_bin]
cron_expression = "0 30 9 1-7,16-21 * 4 *"
name = "Take out the Garbage, Green bin"

[tasks.garbage_green_bin]
cron_expression = "0 30 9 8-15,22-31 * 4 *"
name = "Take out the Recycling, Green bin"

[tasks.rent]
cron_expression = "0 30 9 28 * * *"
name = "Pay rent"

The private repo contains things in my life that recur that I would like to be reminded about. It contains my real tasks.toml. The private repo also contains a GitHub action that looks like this:

name: Send Email

on:
  schedule:
    # * is a special character in YAML so you have to quote this string
    - cron:  '0 11 * * *'

jobs:
  send-email:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: Checkout recurring tasks
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        repository: hockeybuggy/recurring_tasks
        path: recurring_tasks

    - name: Build
      run: cd recurring_tasks && cargo build --verbose --release

    - name: Run the program
      run: ./recurring_tasks/target/release/recurring_tasks_bin --tasks tasks.toml

    - name: SendGrid
      uses: peter-evans/sendgrid-action@v1
      env:
        SENDGRID_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.SEND_GRID_API_KEY }}

Then every day when the GitHub action is triggered I receive an email that contains my daily tasks.