Question

I need this cron job to execute my shell just as it does when I run it on the command line.

I read through the one other question I found about this, but my console-based cron job still is not working. I want to post some code and what it outputs, maybe someone can tell me what’s going on.

First off, this is on Cake 1.3. I am running on Ubuntu 9.10. I have tried the shell-script method described in the Cake Book.

I have NOT established any special user account for running the script. The cake console is on my PATH (for the ubuntu built-in user).

In another question I found, they report that the -app parameter isn’t doing anything. This seems to be the case for me as well.

My shell works as it should when I run this from the command line:

./vendors/cakeshell subscription_reminder -cli /usr/bin -app /var/www/www.example.org/htdocs/app -console /var/www/www.example.org/htdocs/cake/console/cake

the output from this looks like:

Welcome to CakePHP v1.3.2 Console
---------------------------------------------------------------
App : app
Path: /var/www/www.directory.sdcweb.org/htdocs/app
---------------------------------------------------------------

I’m logging my cron-job output to a file and the output of that looks different, like this:

EDIT: i’ve noticed that this following code block is just the cake shell script that comes with CakePHP, if you open up cake/console/cake in a text editor you should find the following script.

################################################################################
#
# Bake is a shell script for running CakePHP bake script
# PHP versions 4 and 5
#
# CakePHP(tm) :  Rapid Development Framework (http://cakephp.org)
# Copyright 2005-2010, Cake Software Foundation, Inc.
#
# Licensed under The MIT License
# Redistributions of files must retain the above copyright notice.
#
# @copyright            Copyright 2005-2010, Cake Software Foundation, Inc.
# @link                         http://cakephp.org CakePHP(tm) Project
# @package                      cake
# @subpackage           cake.cake.console
# @since                                CakePHP(tm) v 1.2.0.5012
# @license                      MIT License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php)
#
################################################################################
LIB=${0/%cake/}
APP=`pwd`

exec php -q ${LIB}cake.php -working "${APP}" "$@"

exit;

My crontab looks like this:

41 20 * * * /var/www/www.example.org/htdocs/app/vendors/cakeshell subscription_reminder -cli /usr/bin -app /var/www/www.example.org/htdocs/app -console /var/www/www.example.org/htdocs/cake/console/cake >> /home/ubuntu/cron-log

Answer 1

Well, after a bit more work on this I finally arrived at a crontab which does what I want. It looks like this:

35 01 * * * cd /var/www/www.example.org/htdocs/app; ../cake/console/cake subscription_reminder

Not only does it work, but it is also a lot more readable.