Crontab Lexer for Pygments

This project provides a custom Pygments lexer for highlighting Unix crontab files, including:

• User crontabs (crontab -e)
• System-wide crontabs (/etc/crontab, /etc/cron.d/*)
• @-directives (@reboot, @daily, etc.)
• Extended parsing for:
  • Minutes, hours, days, months, weekdays
  • Ranges, lists, steps, and wildcards
  • Month and weekday names (jan, feb, mon, sun, …)

Features

• Full syntax highlighting support for all crontab formats
• Proper tokenization of time fields (including ranges and names)
• Works in MediaWiki with the SyntaxHighlight extension
• Distributed as a Python package with Pygments plugin entry point

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Installation on Linux (Ubuntu 22.04)

Follow these steps to install and activate the custom lexer.

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/b3-it/pygments-lexer-crontab
cd pygments-lexer-crontab

2. (Recommended) Use a Python virtual environment

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip

3. Install the lexer package

pip install .

or for development mode:

pip install -e .

4. Test the lexer using pygmentize

pygmentize -L lexers | grep -i crontab

You should see:

* crontab:
    Crontab

Test syntax highlighting:

pygmentize -l crontab -f terminal256 -O style=monokai tests/test.cron

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Using the Lexer in MediaWiki

MediaWiki does not automatically detect new Pygments lexers.
You must point MediaWiki to your pygmentize binary and refresh the lexer list.

1. Edit LocalSettings.php

$wgPygmentizePath = '/full/path/to/pygmentize';

Example:

$wgPygmentizePath = '/home/username/crontab-lexer/.venv/bin/pygmentize';

2. Regenerate the MediaWiki lexer list

This step is required once after installation:

cd path/to/mediawiki/extension/syntaxhighlight
php maintenance/updateLexerList.php

After this, the crontab language becomes available in <syntaxhighlight>.

3. Usage example in MediaWiki

<syntaxhighlight lang="crontab">
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh
</syntaxhighlight>

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Uninstallation

From your environment:

pip uninstall crontab-lexer

If you want to remove the lexer from MediaWiki:

1. Remove or comment out $wgPygmentizePath.
2. Regenerate the lexer list again:

cd path/to/mediawiki/extension/syntaxhighlight
php maintenance/updateLexerList.php

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License

MIT License.