Running Shells as cronjobs

A common thing to do with a shell is making it run as a cronjob to clean up the database once in a while or send newsletters. However, when you have added the console path to the PATH variable via ~/.profile, it will be unavailable to the cronjob.

The following BASH script will call your shell and append the needed paths to $PATH. Copy and save this to your Console folder as ‘cakeshell’ and don’t forget to make it executable. (chmod +x cakeshell)

#!/bin/bash
TERM=dumb
export TERM
cmd="cake"
while [ $# -ne 0 ]; do
    if [ "$1" = "-cli" ] || [ "$1" = "-console" ]; then
        PATH=$PATH:$2
        shift
    else
        cmd="${cmd} $1"
    fi
    shift
done
$cmd

You can call it like:

$ ./Console/cakeshell myshell myparam -cli /usr/bin -console /cakes/2.x.x/lib/Cake/Console

The -cli parameter takes a path which points to the php cli executable and the -console parameter takes a path which points to the CakePHP console.

As a cronjob this would look like:

# m h dom mon dow command
*/5 *   *   *   * /full/path/to/cakeshell myshell myparam -cli /usr/bin -console /cakes/2.x.x/lib/Cake/Console -app /full/path/to/app

A simple trick to debug a crontab is to set it up to dump it’s output to a logfile. You can do this like:

# m h dom mon dow command
*/5 *   *   *   * /full/path/to/cakeshell myshell myparam -cli /usr/bin -console /cakes/2.x.x/lib/Cake/Console -app /full/path/to/app >> /path/to/log/file.log 2>&1