Trouble creating cronjob on Elastic Beanstalk - php

Im running a PHP web environment on Elastic Beanstalk.
Iv tried 6 ways to Sunday to setup a cronjob:
following AWS template on cronjobs in the .ebextensions folder,
manually creatingn the job in the shell using: crontab -e as suggested here https://stackoverflow.com/questions... and more...
Currently I have this config file in the .ebextensions folder saved as cron-linux.config
files:
"/etc/cron.d/mycron":
mode: "000644"
owner: root
group: root
content: |
*/3 * * * * root /var/www/html/crawler/mine.php >/dev/null 2>&1
commands:
remove_old_cron:
command: "rm -f /etc/cron.d/mycron.bak"
Please help!

Success!
Steps to fixing the issue:
After using the AWS example Cron Job found HERE,
Run the PHP script from the bash script:
#!/bin/bash
php -f /var/www/html/mine.php
exit 0
Then made "mine.php" executable using
sudo chmod +x mine.php
Two issues:
connection details to the database had to be hard coded as the $SERVER variable didnt work (Not sure why)
the part of the script that sends an email with the results still doesnt work.
Not sure why some things work when running the script from the browser but not in bash? But at least the Cron job is working.
Hope this helps someone

Related

php shell_exec and hg pull

I have written simple php script to help me update site contents when the commit is sent to bitbucket. I have following problem with it.
<?php
$repo_dir = '/var/www/vhosts/my_full_path';
$output = shell_exec('cd '.$repo_dir.' && hg --config auth.rc.prefix=https://bitbucket.org/XXXXX --config auth.rc.username=my_username --config auth.rc.password=my_pass pull -u https://bitbucket.org/XXXXXXX &');
echo $output;
?>
When I type it to web browser it doesn't work. The output of script is:
pulling from https://bitbucket.org/XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
but when I try to execute it under console on the server it works like a charm:
php myscript.php
generates following output:
pulling from https://bitbucket.org/XXXX
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 2 changesets with 2 changes to 1 files
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
See the oupt is full and correct! in concole I'm using root user in web browser data-www? Is there any difference in this case?
I have found the solution. I hope it helps someone.
There were two problems:
Permissions to my repo dir
Authentication for user www-data for this repo
The problem occured because web browser doesn't flush warnings and abort messages while executing command shell_exec. If you want to test your script, you have to lgoin to console by SSH (as root for example) then execute script / command as apache user:
sudo -u www-data php /path-to-your-script/script.php
In console you will see all problems which following user generates.

Elastic Beanstalk - Cron job is running but not executing

This is my very first time running a cron job on Elastic Beanstalk (EB). After deploying my code, it seems the cron job is created and running but the PHP script is not executing correctly. Here's my set-up.
In my .ebextensions folder I have a file called 01run.config.
container_commands:
01_remove_old_cron_jobs:
command: "crontab -r || exit 0"
02_cronjobs:
command: "cat .ebextensions/cron_jobs.txt > /etc/cron.d/cron_job && chmod 644 /etc/cron.d/cron_job"
leader_only: true
In my .ebextensions folder I also have a cron_jobs.txt file. Please note that I have an line break at the end of this file as instructed by another stackoverflow post. In my example below I am running the command as ec2-user but I also tried root.
* * * * * ec2-user /usr/bin/php -q /var/app/current/tests/cron.php
After deploying my code, I can see that the file /etc/cron.d/cron_job has been created. I can also see the cron job running every minute when I run sudo tail /var/log/cron.
[ec2-user#ip-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx ~]$ sudo tail /var/log/cron
Apr 13 12:54:53 ip-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx crontab[26093]: (root) DELETE (root)
Apr 13 12:55:01 ip-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx crond[1230]: (*system*) RELOAD (/etc/cron.d/cron_job)
Apr 13 12:55:01 ip-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx CROND[26128]: (ec2-user) CMD (/usr/bin/php -q /var/app/current/tests/cron.php)
Apr 13 12:56:01 ip-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx CROND[26139]: (ec2-user) CMD (/usr/bin/php -q /var/app/current/tests/cron.php)
Within /var/app/current/tests/cron.php I have some code that adds a row to a MySQL database (hosted on RDS). But nothing is being added to the database.
I then tried running the cron command directly through my terminal window:
$ /usr/bin/php -q /var/app/current/tests/cron.php
And it runs without error and adds the record to the database. I am logged in as ec2-user in terminal.
Have I missed something? Or is my cron job code set-up incorrectly?
I had a similar problem with a php script that was trying to access an AWS RDS database. Is your php script getting the database details with $_SERVER['RDS_xxxx']? If so, those RDS_xxxx variables don't exist in the environment when the php script is run by cron.
In order to fix this, I added the variables to the beginning of the cron file:
RDS_HOSTNAME=<my_database_hostname>
RDS_PORT=<my_database_port>
RDS_USERNAME=<my_database_username>
RDS_PASSWORD=<my_database_password>
RDS_DB_NAME=<my_database_name>
* * * * * php /path/to/my/script.php
Login via SSH and check if generated cron job file/etc/cron.d/cron_job have unix line ending i.e. ASCII text not win i.e. ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators.
To check the line ending refer the answer here.
Note: If you have windows line ending then you will have to convert the line ending of file .ebextensions/cron_jobs.txt, for that you can use dos2unix or similar program.
I had a similar problem with my RDS_ variables on AWS, I followed this discussion and it works.
This was my cronjob before:
RDS_HOSTNAME=<my_database_hostname>
RDS_PORT=<my_database_port>
RDS_USERNAME=<my_database_username>
RDS_PASSWORD=<my_database_password>
RDS_DB_NAME=<my_database_name>
* * * * * cd /var/app/current && bin/cake notifications send_push >> /var/tmp/notifications.log 2>&1
And changed to this:
* * * * * . /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars cd /var/app/current && bin/cake notifications send_push >> /var/tmp/notifications.log 2>&1
And now I can access them like: $_SERVER['RDS_HOSTNAME']

Cloning git in bash script called from php webpage

I have very annoying problem here that I am completely lost on.
Am just trying to run a bash script from a php page.
The bash script is a long one.... so I created a caller.sh which calls the ./mainScript.sh to run in the background in the following:
nohup /bin/bash /home/test/customcoincode/CoinCreationBashFile.sh $coinName $coinNameAbreviation $blockReward $blockSpacing $targetTimespan $totalCoins $seedNode $nameSeedNode $headline >> /tmp/BASH2log.txt 2>&1 &
in reading my log file it seems some variables are not being passed in...
and at the following lines of code:
echo "Creating New Coin - Downloading code base repo"
echo "$localFolder/$coinName"
mkdir -p "$localFolder/$coinName";
cd "$localFolder/$coinName"
git clone "$baseRepository" "$localFolder/$coinName"
echo "Made it here 1"
i get outputs of:
Creating New Coin - Downloading code base repo
/home/test/Foocoin
cloning into '/home/test/Foocoin'
could not create directory '/var/www/.ssh'
host key verification failed
blah blah ....
Why is it looking in the /var/www/ directory?? works fine if I run the script from terminal?
many thanks
So to pack up my comments in an answer:
The shell script is now run as apache, as git uses ssh, corresponding config files are needed. Which were created in /var/www; apaches home directory. Apache did not have write permissions in /var/www thus could not create these files.
To resolve, create the /var/www/.ssh directory yourself and give www-data (or whatever user apache runs under in your system) write access to that folder.
Next, github requires you to authorize ssh keys. It is safer to create a new one for apache in the newly created /var/www/.ssh directory and add this key to your github keychain.

Running command-line application from PHP as specific user

I am running Apache on my localhost. From a PHP script run as www-user I would like to control Rhythmbox playback on my machine. So far I have a simple command in my PHP script:
exec('rhythmbox-client --pause');
This works great when I run it from the command-line as me, but if it runs as www-user I guess rhythmbox-client doesn't know/can't access my instance of Rhythmbox.
Is there an easy way for that PHP script to run as my user rather than www-user, or to tell rhythmbox-client which instance to control?
The overall application is that when my phone goes off-hook it calls my PHP script which pauses music, and resumes playback when the phone is on-hook. I love VoIP phones!
Solution:
Thanks to Carpetsmoker and Tarek I used sudo as the answer but there was a couple of problems. To overcome them I did the following:
Created a bash script to call rhythmbox-client. This bash script was executed using sudo in PHP as described in the answer below. Unfortunately rhythmbox-client didn't know what environment to control, so the bash script looks like this:
#! /bin/bash
DBUS_ADDRESS=`grep -z DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS /proc/*/environ 2> /dev/null| sed 's/DBUS/\nDBUS/g' | tail -n 1`
if [ "x$DBUS_ADDRESS" != "x" ]; then
export $DBUS_ADDRESS
/usr/bin/rhythmbox-client --pause
fi
Now that bash script can be executed by PHP and wwwuser, and my phone can pause/play my music!
One solution is using sudo(8):
exec('sudo -u myuser ls /');
You will, obviously, need to setup sudo(8) to allow the user running your webserver to invoke it. Editing the sudoers file with visudo(8), you can use something like:
wwwuser ALL=/usr/bin/rhythmbox-client
To prevent Apache from being able to run other commands and only the rythymbox command.
In my case, the solution came this way:
Added this lines to sudoers file:
myuser ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/prlctl
_www ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/prlctl # IMPORTANT!!!
The EXEC() command in PHP was changed to:
exec("sudo -u myuser prlctl list -a", $out, $r);
If a process can be run by any user it can be run by PHP. Example is fortune command
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 18816 Oct 1 2009 /usr/games/fortune
Look at the x permission for every user. But this some times doesn't at all work and you may have to let the user, www-data or apache etc, run the program. You can sudo www-data and try to run the command. If it works then Apache/PHP should be able to run it.

Problem running a small script as cron job

I am problem scheduling and running a script through cron job. I am on linux (ubuntu), it is a VPS.
What I am doing is I have put this line in crontab file that is here: /etc/crontab
I wrote:
*/15 * * * * www-data php /var/www/abs/phpscript.php
I have given 777 to the file and after writing above in crontab , I run command:
crontab crontab
Then after almost some time I got the mail in my /var/mail/username file that says: /bin/sh: root: not found
So I am unable to understand what is the problem.
I also run phpinfo and it shows the third variable as APACHE that probably means that PHP is running as apache module.
Please tell what can be the possible solution.
thanks in advance to every one who will try to solve my problem.
You can try also to run it using "wget -q -O"
or
*/15 * * * * lynx -dump "url" > /dev/null
Wget examples:
*/15 * * * * wget -O /dev/null 'http://www.mydomain.com/document.php?&user=myuser&password=mypass' >/dev/null
If you need to post data you can use
--post-data "login=user&password=pass"
*/15 * * * * wget -O /dev/null 'http://www.mydomain.com/document.php?&user=myuser&password=mypass' --post-data 'foo=bar' >/dev/null
If you edited /etc/crontab, you should re-read the warning at the top of the file:
# /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab
# Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab'
# command to install the new version when you edit this file
# and files in /etc/cron.d. These files also have username fields,
# that none of the other crontabs do.
Running crontab(1) on the /etc/crontab file probably contaminated the root user's crontab(5) file (the one stored in /var/spool/cron/crontabs/). I suggest running crontab -e as root to edit the crontab file, and remove all the entries that are identical to the entries from /etc/crontab. (Maybe you just contaminated your own personal crontab(5) -- if crontab -e as root didn't show anything, run crontab -e under your own personal account and see if the system-wide entries were duplicated into your own crontab(5).)
I don't know what file you ran chmod 777 on, but that was probably unnecessary. You really should set your permissions to be as strict as possible to confine the results of malicious attacks or unintentional mistakes.
You are running a crontab as a user, which means you can't specify the user in the cron.
The template you borrowed your example from was for a system (root) cron.
Remove the username and try again.

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