Cron – How to use curl in a cron job

croncurl

I need to set up a cron job in cpanel that calls a URL (on the same server) once a week. I was going to use wget but it turns out this is disabled on the shared server being used.

Is there an alternative to wget? I've heard that curl can be used but I don't know how to set that up in a cron command.

Also, what's the command to make the cronjob do nothing on completion?

Any ideas greatly appreciated!

Best Answer

instead of using wget, curl works like this:

curl --silent http://domain.com/cron.php

which will work in the same way as wget. if its a php file you are launching, is there any reason you cant run it via the command line php interpreter like so:

php -q /path/to/cron.php

same on a webserver request and often will work much faster and without certain timeout restrictions present when called via webserver/curl

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Cron job fails silently

The usual problem with 'cron' jobs is that they have zero environment - unlike 'at' jobs which do copy your environment. When something works from the command line and not from 'cron', my experience is that 'environment' is one of the most common problems. Occasionally you run into another problem - 'cron' jobs are not run with a terminal, and occasionally programs get stroppy about this. However, this is in the 1% range compared with 99% for environment issues.

The other key technique I use is to always run a shell script from 'cron'; the shell script ensures that the environment is set correctly and then runs the real program. If a 'cron' job is giving me problems, I can then tweak the script to do useful things like this:

{
    date
    env | sort
    set -x
    ...what was there before adding the debug...
} >/tmp/cron.jobname.$$ 2>&1

This redirects all the output - standard output and standard error - to a file name. You can build timestamps into the filename if you prefer that to the process ID. Analyzing the log files often reveals the problems swiftly.

Centos – Why can the cron job not find a specific command

Are you using absolute paths? Cron jobs won't open an interactive shell, so bash init scripts (bashrc, bash_profile, etc.) that usually set the PATH may not be run--and if they are, they'll be using root's, not yours. If you're unsure about where the command is, you can use which <command> to find out the absolute path.

When dealing with cron scripts, the general rule of thumb is, you either (a) want to set the PATH or (b) use absolute paths.

Good luck!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Cron job fails silently

Centos – Why can the cron job not find a specific command

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