Question

My problem is that the cronjob seems to be running fine, but not executing the code properly within the .sh files, please see below for details.

I type crontab -e, to bring up cron:
In that file:

30 08 * * 1-5 /home/user/path/backup.sh
45 08 * * 1-5 /home/user/path/runscript.sh >> /home/user/cronlog.log 2>&1

backup.sh:

#!/bin/sh
if [ -e "NEW_BACKUP.sql.gz" ]
then
    mv "NEW_BACKUP.sql.gz" "OLD_BACKUP.sql.gz"
fi
mysqldump -u username -ppassword db --max_allowed_packet=99M | gzip -9c > NEW_BACKUP.sql.gz

runscript.sh:

#!/bin/sh
python /home/user/path/uber_sync.py

uber_sync.py:

import keyword_sync
import target_milestone_sync
print "Starting Sync"
keyword_sync.sync()
print "Keyword Synced"
target_milestone_sync.sync()
print "Milestone Synced"
print "Finished Sync"

The problem is, it seems to do the print statements in uber_sync, but not actually execute the code from the import statements… Any ideas?

Also note that keyword_sync and target_milestone_sync are located in the same directory as uber_sync, namely /home/user/path

Thank you for any help.

Answer 1

Your import statements fail because python can not locate your modules. Add them them to your search path and then import your modules, like this (add this to uber_sync.py):

import sys
sys.path.append("/home/user/path")
import keyword_sync
import target_milestone_sync

Python looks for modules in the current directory (the dir the code is executed in), in the $PYTHONPATH environment variable and config files. This all ends up in sys.path which can be edited like any list object. If you want to learn more about the reasons a certain module gets imported or not i suggest also looking into the standard module imp.

In your case you tested your code in /home/user/path via python uber_sync.py and it worked, because your modules were in the current directory. But when execute it in some/other/dir via python /home/user/path/uber_sync.py the current dir becomes some/other/dir and your modules are not found.