Question

I have managed to get a cron job to run a rake task by doing the following:

cd /home/myusername/approotlocation/ && /usr/bin/rake sendnewsletter RAILS_ENV=development

i have checked with which ruby and which rake to make sure the paths are correct (from bash)

the job looks like it wants to run as i get the following email from the cron daemon when it completes

Missing these required gems:
      chronic  
      whenever  
      searchlogic  
      adzap-ar_mailer  
      twitter  
      gdata  
      bitly  
      ruby-recaptcha

You're running:
  ruby 1.8.7.22 at /usr/bin/ruby
  rubygems 1.3.5 at /home/myusername/gems, /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8

Run `rake gems:install` to install the missing gems.
(in /home/myusername/approotlocation)

my custom rake file within lib/tasks is as follows:

task :sendnewsletter => :environment do
 require 'rubygems'
 require 'chronic'  
 require 'whenever'  
 require 'searchlogic'  
 require 'adzap-ar_mailer'  
 require 'twitter'  
 require 'gdata'  
 require 'bitly'  
 require 'ruby-recaptcha'
   @recipients = Subscription.all(:conditions => {:active => true})
    for user in @recipients
      Email.send_later(:deliver_send_newsletter,user)
    end
end

with or without the require items, it still gives me the same error …

can anyone shed some light on this? or alternatively advise me on how to make a custom file within the script directory that will run this function (I already have a cron job working that will run and process all my delayed_jobs.

After Jonathans suggestion below I ran

env

as a cron job on its own and received the following output:

SHELL=/bin/sh
MAILTO=myemailaddress
USER=myusername
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
PWD=/home/myusername
SHLVL=1
HOME=/home/myusername
LOGNAME= myusername
_=/usr/bin/env

does this mean it’s not loading the ruby files properly?
….
also took Jonathans advice and produced the following cron.sh file

#!/bin/sh
date
echo "Executing Matenia Rake Task"
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
cd /home/myusername/approotlocation/
rake sendnewsletter

still getting the missing gems notice …
Cheers!

Answer 1

Easiest way to fix this (but kind of a shotgun approche) is from your shell type

env | grep PATH

Then take this output and add it your crontab for that user

so it would look something like this

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

# m h dom mon dow user    command
42 6 * * *        root    job1
47 6 * * 7        root    job2
52 6 1 * *        root    job3

Just make sure your gems’s are inside of that path