crontab configuration

[goldenbough]

I am having some trouble getting a crontab going on my server. I would like to have a rake task for ruby on rails application done with cron.


Here is the command:
*/59 * * * * cd apps/project/current && rake thinking_sphinx:index RAILS_ENV=production



Here is the log:

CRON[2969]: (user) CMD (cd apps/project/current && rake thinking_sphinx:index RAILS_ENV=production)


I can cut and past the command, excluding the parenthesis, and the rake task runs fine.

[john newbuntu]

cd apps/project/current does not look like an absolute path. It may be a path under your home directory, in which case you will have to full path it. Example:

cd /home/user/apps/project/current

[goldenbough]

I changed it to the full path from / , but still it doesn't actually index the files, I see it running the command in the log though.


cd /home/user/apps/project/current && rake thinking_sphinx:index RAILS_ENV=production

[goldenbough]

I added another line that prints out a message in a log and this works. So I guess it is something about rails and the rake command.



*/1 * * * * cd /home/user/apps/project/current && rake thinking_sphinx:index RAILS_ENV=production
*/1 * * * * echo "hello world: $(date)" >> /home/user/log2

[goldenbough]

I added these lines at the top of the crontab file, and now am good to go.

PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
SHELL=/bin/bash

[CharlesA]

Interesting. You probably would have had better results, if you create a shellscript and ran that in cron instead of adding varibles and whatnot directly to the crontab.

It would have looked cleaner, at least. :)