Inevitably, you’ll have to write a post-install routine in Python that has to schedule a Cron job. For this, python-crontab is a great solution.

Create the job using the following. This will not commit the changes, yet.

from crontab import CronTab    
cron = CronTab()
job = cron.new(command='/usr/bin/tool')

There are at least three ways to configure the schedule:

Using method calls:

job.minute.during(5,50).every(5)
job.hour.every(4)

Using an existing crontab row:

job.parse("* * * * * /usr/bin/tool")

Obviously in the last case, you can omit the command when we created the job.

Using an alias:

job.special = '@daily'

You can commit your changes by then calling:

job.write()

This is a very limited introduction that elaborates on how to use aliases and parsing to schedule, since the documentation doesn’t go into it, but omits other features such as:

• indicating the user to schedule for (the default is “root”)
• finding existing jobs by command or comment
• enumerating jobs
• enumerating the schedule that a particular job will follow
• enumerating the logs for a particular job
• removing jobs
• editing a crontab file directly, or building one in-memory
• enabling/disabling jobs

The official documentation (follow the link, above) describes all of the features on this list.