CronMeetCal

(Cron)tab Scheduling · Zoom (Meet)ings · Google (Cal)endar

Crontab, meet calendar; automate scheduling cron jobs to join Zoom meetings found in your Google Calendar.

What does CronMeetCal do?

CronMeetCal ensures you will never be late to your meetings again.

Each run, this script checks your scheduled meetings in Google Calendar, then appends entries to your crontab that will automatically join those with Zoom meetings at the scheduled time. It will also clean meetings added in previous runs, and skips adding entries if any holiday or out of office events are detected on your calendar.

It can be run directly, but works best as an @daily or @hourly crontab entry.

Dependencies

• gcalcli - A command line interface for the Google Calendar API (requires an Oauth Client ID & Secret)
• nowplaying-cli - Optional: A command line interface for controlling music playback from any source

Additional Features

• Maintains a daily event log file of a user-configurable length (default 100 lines).
• Integrates with nowplaying-cli to ensure active music is paused prior to opening your meeting.
• Can optionally be configured to back up one week of pre & post run crontab files (daily or hourly).

Setup

1. Install dependencies:

brew install gcalcli

# Optional: install nowplaying-cli to pause music
brew install nowplaying-cli

2. Obtian an Oauth Client ID & Secret from Google Developer Console w/ read scopes for Google Calendar API

3. Run the following to initialize gcalcli, then follow the prompts to login:

gcalcli --client-id=[oath-client-id] init

4. Download this script to somewhere in your $PATH and make it executable:

curl -sL -o ~/.local/bin/cron-meet-cal \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tjsmith/cron-meet-cal/master/cron-meet-cal.sh
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/cron-meet-cal

5. Prepend your crontab with a daily entry that runs this script (or hourly to pick up impromptu meetings):

echo -e "@daily\t[optional: desired envs] /path/to/cron-meet-cal\n$(crontab -l)" | crontab -

# Or, hourly using all default values
echo -e "@hourly\t/path/to/cron-meet-cal\n$(crontab -l)" | crontab -

Permissions

You may get a confirmation popup when running step 5 about elevated permissions. If so, you'll need to allow your terminal editor full disk access in Settings in order to let this script update your crontab unattended. To do so, go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access and enable access for your terminal emulator app.

This is due to a new MacOS Sonoma setting, but is generally safe - many common apps for Mac (like Alfred) require this setting as well. Even enabled, user specific permissions will still limit file access per user.

ENV's

CronMeetCal can be configured if desired with the following envs:

Env	Description	Default
CMC_BACKUP_DIR	Directory to store crontab backups	/tmp/cmc
CMC_ENABLE_BACKUP	Enable crontab backups	true
CMC_ENABLE_DEBUG	Enable debug logging	true
CMC_LOG_FILE	File to log events	${CMC_BACKUP_DIR}/events.log
CMC_LOG_LIMIT	Max lines to keep in log file	100
CMC_OFFSET_MIN	# min prior to meeting start to open Zoom	1