Linux – Crontab not running

crondjangolinuxpython

I am using putty to login in webfaction server. I used crontab -e command and wrote this line over there and restarted apache. According to this line it would run every minute but even after restarting its not running. But why? I want to run python script if i run it through putty by using python2.7 alerts_test.py it runs perfectly. But using cron it does'nt. Please help. Thanks in advance. My crontab command is below…

* * * * * /home/gbtech/webapps/django/lib/python2.7 /home/gbtech/webapps/django/fortis_django/alerts_test.py

also tried

* * * * * python2.7 /home/gbtech/webapps/django/fortis_django/alerts_test.py

Best Answer

Couple questions..

Did you try placing a MAILTO directive at the top? This would send you all encountered errors.

MAILTO:"mydebugmail@gmail.com"
* * * * * /home/gbtech/webapps/django/lib/python2.7/home/gbtech/webapps/django/fortis_django/alerts_test.py

Did you check if alerts_test.py is set to be executable? Perhaps try chmodding it to 755 just in case?
Is crond, the cron daemon running?
Is there any info in the log, found in /var/log/cron ?

Related Solutions

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.

Crontab doesn’t work on centos 6

/etc/crontab has a different format. Note the "root" in the 6th field. For /etc/crontab, the 6th field is for the user you want the job to execute as.

So, something like:

*/2 * * * * dorsen /usr/bin/php -q /home/dorsen/public_html/cron-test.php

is the right format, executing that job as "dorsen".

Your second form, with the URL, is really not going to work, as there's no such thing as http://www.mysiteurl.com/cron-test.php in your execution path.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Cron job fails silently

Crontab doesn’t work on centos 6

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