I recently needed to have a script execute on a daily basis – previously this would have been a task for cron however it’s been deprecated (yet still all there) in macOS since something like 10.4.

The accepted way to do it now is via a Launch Daemon. Simple in theory, but easier said than done. It’s far easier to edit a single line in a crontab entry (even if you have to look up the unique syntax of the crontab) than it is to create a Launch Daemon xml .plist file.

Fortunately, Nathan Witmer has created Launched – a web-based tool to create launchd plist files.

From here it was easy – I created my script as per normal and put it in /usr/local/bin

I made up a name for my daemon, set the command to /usr/local/bin/my_amazing_script.sh and configured it to run every day at 8pm (ironically, using the cron syntax to schedule it).

After hitting the Create .plist button, I was given my entire plist to copy and paste, as well as a couple of snippets to install the plist via using curl to get it from Launched, copying it to /Library/LaunchDaemons and using launchctl to load it.