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Question

cURL with cron job not working

Hello

I’ve tried to create a cron job with a curl to a specific page on my website. On that page, when loaded, it’s sending out an e-mail to some specific people. I’ve tested the script, and it’s working just as intended.

What I’ve done to enable my cron job is:

  • Log in to my server
  • Run: sudo crontab -e
  • Added: * 17 * * * curl http://url.com/cron/email to the file and saved

What I tried to here was to make a cron job calling the url once a day at 5pm. For some reason this is never happening - not even at another time of the day, it’s like it’s never run.

What am I doing wrong?

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Sousa211 • May 8, 2018

If you’re looking for a simpler cron job solution, you might consider webcron services like easycron.com which will load a specific URL at a given time.

Ryan Quinn • April 25, 2018

This question was answered by @aha:

One more tip for debugging: to see the logged results of the cron task you set up to run every minute, use grep CRON /var/log/syslog to print out all the lines related to cron. You should see something like:

CRON[2179]: (root) CMD (/usr/bin/curl http://url.com/cron/email)

However - you are right, there is a big difference between running curl http://url.com/cron/email and visiting http://url.com/cron/email in the browser:

When you visit http://url.com/cron/email in the browser, if it returns an HTML doctype, the browser will: A) Download the HTML, B) Download any Javascript, CSS, Images referenced in the HTML, C)Render the page, D)Execute all Javascript.

When you curl http://url.com/cron/email, it is just A) Downloading the HTML

So if the thing that causes the email send is executed via javascript on the page, curling it will not help.

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