MyTime Kroger - Using Red Hat tools to automate schedule access

[michealjames]

Hi,
I’m curious if anyone has used Red Hat automation tools (such as Ansible or CRON on RHEL) to automate secure access or reporting of external schedules like MyTime Kroger employee schedules. What would be a safe and compliant approach in a Red Hat environment?

Thanks!

[Travis]

@michealjames -

Not exactly sure what you are trying to ask in the question, but I am going to guess a bit ...

I'm guessing you are wanting a way to securely connect to an application (WebApp most likely) called MyTime Kroger. The bigger question is, does this application have an API? If the answer is yes, I would say Ansible would most likely be a little more secure as you can leverage the Ansible vaults for username/password and sensitive information. you can then construct your API query to pull back the schedule information.

If the answer to the API being there is no and you must login interactively in the web browser, it becomes more difficult. In the event no API is available, you could leverage Python and Playwrite or Selenium to perform the tasks in the web browser for you. You could use Ansible for these scripts to provide the launching and scheduling of running as well as Ansible vault to secure the "secrets" needed to login to the application. 

You can also use CRON, but that would involve CURL commands or running the Python scripts directly and it might be more difficult to protect things like username/password without any other applications in the mix.

The big thing is can you script something to pull the schedule or report from the application? If the answer is yes, it can be automated ... if the answer is no, there isn't a way to automate. If it can be automated, Ansible would be much easier using something like AAP with built-in schedules and the credentials and Ansible vault to create a secure and reliable means of access.