Question

I’m running a simple python script sending data to a mongodb

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import time
from datetime import datetime
import pymongo
from pymongo import Connection

today = { 'date and time' : datetime.today() }

connection = Connection()
db = connection.tests
collection = db.times

collection.insert(today)

And I’m trying to use cron to schedule this every minute. I’ve used crontab to set this

* * * * * /Users/MyUser/XX/YY/ZZ/timetest.py

And I can execute this perfectly using python timetest.py from the correct directory; however the program is still not running on its own. I feel like I’m very close to getting it to work, can anyone help me with this?

Answer 1

It is likely that the cron environment does not match your user’s environment. In cron you can either set the path variable in crontab like

PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin
* * * * * /Users/MyUser/XX/YY/ZZ/timetest.py

or you can just explicitly call the python binary on your script

* * * * * /usr/bin/python /Users/MyUser/XX/YY/ZZ/timetest.py

or you can set the shebang line in your script to reference the python binary explicitly (this may not be desirable if you ever use virtualenv)

#!/usr/bin/python
...