Autogenerate cron task with new server

May 24, 2017 2.7k views
PHP Linux Basics Linux Commands Ubuntu 16.04
rubenlech
By:
rubenlech

Hi,

I try to create new server and add in User Data command to create new cron task.

My code:

sudo apt-get install cron
(crontab -l ; echo "* * * * * php /var/www/html/test.php") | crontab -

When I run ‘nano /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root’, I get :

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (- installed on Wed May 24 08:27:25 2017)
# (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $)
* * * * * php /var/www/html/test.php

Unfortunelly server doesn’t run my test file.
PHP syntax in file is correct, because when I run it via browser everything work propelly.

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1 Answer
jtittle1 May 24, 2017

@rubenlech

You shouldn’t need to attempt to install cron as it’s already part of the distro.

That said, try using:

echo "* * * * * php /var/www/html/test.php" | crontab

You can then confirm that the scheduled task exists by running crontab -e.

I setup a test script using the same command and it did exactly as expected.

<?php
$file   =   '/usr/local/src/test.log';
$date   =   date('Y-m-d') . PHP_EOL;

$file   =   file_put_contents( $file, $date, FILE_APPEND );

All it’s doing is appending $date to a new line in test.log every minute.

After 10 minutes, the file looked like:

2017-05-24
2017-05-24
2017-05-24
2017-05-24
2017-05-24
2017-05-24
2017-05-24
2017-05-24
2017-05-24
2017-05-24

At which point I deleted the task since it was working as expected.

…

You’ll need to make sure you have the CLI package installed for your PHP version. Since this is executing from the command line, that package is required.

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