Cron – Unable to run aws s3 sync as a cron job

amazon s3backupcron

I'm having trouble running aws s3 sync as a cron job (on Ubuntu 16.04). Here's what I am able to do:

  • Manually run the script in the /etc/cron.hourly directory using sudo
    (so it doesn't seem to be a problem with passing environment values)
  • Manually run the script in a user directory without sudo

  • Add either the script or the command itself to /etc/crontab – using
    either one of these:

    23 * * * * myusername aws s3 sync /home/myusername/temp/ s3://manning2323

    */1 * * * * myusername /home/dbclinton/myusername/temp/s3script.sh

The problem with /etc/crontab, of course, is that it's liable to be overwritten by updates, so it's not good enough for my purposes.

Now here's what doesn't work:

  • Leaving the script in cron.hourly and waiting for it to run
    automatically. It does run (as syslog and journalctl report), but the
    AWS CLI isn't providing me with any output that I can see so I have
    no way of knowing why the sync isn't happening. How do I know the
    sync isn't happening? Because new files aren't showing up in my S3
    bucket.

  • I get exactly the same result with my own crontab adding this line
    through crontab -e

    47 18 * * * /home/myusername/temp/s3script.sh >> /home/myusername/cronlog.txt

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks,

Best Answer

As it turns out, because cron is a bit unpredictable in how it sees the PATH, I had to reference the aws binary in my script using its absolute address (/usr/local/bin/aws).

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