Question

I am running a cronjob that runs a PHP script to do a couple of things; first, it opens the database and stores the contents of the tables into memcache; second it creates a Javascript file that is basically a couple of arrays so that the client browser can do a lot of the work and save the server from being overloaded. This is newly added.

The script runs manually very well, and for over a year it has done its job, updating memcache every 10 minutes. The Javascript file add on is the big problem here; the cronjob s/b creating a new, updated edition of this file every 10 minutes, but appears to be not working unless I run it manually from the command line.

I can check this by doing:

ls -al id_index.js  

and checking the timestamp in the file listing.

Is there some problem with creating a Javascript file from a script started by crontab?

Btw, the cronjob file entry looks like this:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/10 * * * * php /home/accountname/public_html/mc_store_arrays.php

Any and all help is appreciated.

Answer 1

In which directory are you expecting the javascript file to be created? It probably is being created somewhere … wherever cron’s working directory happens to be when the script runs (/root/ perhaps?). Make sure your output file is specified with an absolute path or with e.g:

file_put_contents(__DIR__ . '/id_index.js', $content);

which will create the file based on the path of the php script that’s running, rather than the path from which it was executed.