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/emailto 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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Here are a couple suggestions:
Use absolute paths in cron: cron jobs are executed by crond in a minimal environment without a shell (unless you force one to be created), the regular shell setup (including things like your PATH variable that helps map
curlto/usr/bin/curl) never happens. More referenceDo you intend to log the entire response HTML? I think right now, you are saving everything that comes back from
http://url.com/cron/emailin/var/log/cron. If your response is just a short plaintext thing that should be fine, but if it is returning html there’s going to be a lot of junk in your logs. Add the--silentoption to avoid that.Pipe output to dev/null The Cron daemon that runs your command wants to send the output to the email address associated with your account, but I am guessing you don’t have email configured and you dont need that so add
>/dev/null 2>&1to the end of the command to pipe all output to /dev/null (same as ignoring it)So with all that, try:
Hey @aha
Thank you for answering my question.
Unfortunately it’s not working. I’ve tried to add the line you’ve recommended, and made it run every minute
* * * * *just for testing purpose, but nothing seems to work.I have no intention of logging anything. I just want to run the URL once a day at 5pm - nothing else. Since on that webpage it’s doing some logic. Maybe this is not even possible? To run a webpage like if you visited it in the browser?
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/syslogto print out all the lines related to cron. You should see something like:However - you are right, there is a big difference between running
curl http://url.com/cron/emailand 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.