PHP `exec()` doesn't work if run by Cron - php

I have a PHP script that is being called every minute by crontab like this:
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/cronjobs/watchdog/watchdogExec.php
The script executes a number of other PHP scripts and passes a variable like so:
$ccmd = "nohup sudo /usr/bin/php watchdog.php " . $var . " &";
exec($ccmd);
When called from a browser, watchdogExec.php runs fine and does its job. However when I added the cronjob, the script is not working and is spamming mails with the following error:
No entry for terminal type "unknown";
using dumb terminal settings.
This error appears the same number of times exec() is called, so I figured that must be the issue. I searched and read about cronjob not running commands in a terminal, and I tried setting the environment in the crontask, but it did not help. Apparently PHP is printing that error, but I haven't found anything in their documentation about it.
* * * * * /usr/bin/env TERM=xterm /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/cronjobs/watchdog/watchdogExec.php
I am running CentOS 7.
Edit:
Searched some more and found out about PHP environment variables. Someone fixed a similar problem by adding the following in their PHP script. However this is not fixing my problem, it only stops the mail spam. The script is still not working.
putenv('SHELL=/bin/bash');
putenv('TERM=xterm');


Have you tried using full paths in your exec statement too? Also try adding the TERM environment variable:
$ccmd = "nohup /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/env TERM=xterm /usr/bin/php watchdog.php " . $var . " &";


I do this with a 'shell script wrapper'. I add a file phpcron.sh with
#!/bin/bash
php -f filename.php
and add this to crontab.
* * * * * /var/www/phpcron.sh

Related

Issue With Cron Job On MAC OS

I'm trying to run my first cron job on MAC OS (my localhost is running MAMP).
To access crontab, to run a cron job, I'm typing the following into the command line:
crontab -e
Then I press i on the keyboard to go into insert mode to insert the cron job.
The cron job inserted is
* * * * * wget http://localhost:8888/project/cron.php
Then I press esc and type :wq in the command line.
I then get a message:
installing new crontab
Then I check what cronjobs are running with crontab -l and it says:
* * * * * wget http://localhost:8888/project/cron.php
But nothing happens...
On a separate note, below is the script I'm executing as a test script in the cron.php file. It is meant to generate a new time stamp in a text file in the root of the project (the cron job is supposed to make this happen every minute):
<?php
$file = dirname(__FILE__) . '/output.txt';
$data = "hello, it's " . date('d/m/Y H:i:s') . "\n";
file_put_contents($file, $data, FILE_APPEND);
?>
If anyone has any advice as to why this isn't working I'd be hugely grateful.
I've tried the steps shown above at both system level (i.e macmini) and also in my 'project' folder.
I'm completely new to all of this so any help would be amazing.

The solution to this was to use the file paths not the url. First I found where the php was located. I did this with:
whereis php
This gave me the following file path:
/usr/bin/php
I then got the FULL file path to the cron.php file in my project:
/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/project/cron.php
I then combined the two in the crontab cron job:
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/project/cron.php
The actual steps I used are the same as in my original question.

Cron tab doesn't run most of tasks

I setup several cron jobs to make things work. laravel scheduler works perfectly but my other cronjobs not working at all.
*/2 * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/cronjobs/index.php
when I run on the console /usr/bin/php /var/www/cronjobs/index.php it works properly. I checked executable php path with which php and gives me /usr/bin/php nothing wrong with path afaik. I tried to run php script as apache user www-data I opened crontab with crontab -u www-data -e and paste command there.. it didn't work too.
I also tried send dummy notify with crontab and it also didn't work either
dummy example
* * * * * /usr/bin/notify-send 'test'
both of them doesn't work. What am I missing here ?

The second command will not send notification as cron have no idea of your desktop environment.
The first command probably use some environment variables. So instead of run in command line you can try to create a script:
#!/bin/bash
source /path/to/user/home/.bashrc #you can try also .bash_profile
/usr/bin/php /var/www/cronjobs/index.php
and your cron to be like:
*/2 * * * * /path/to/script.sh

Run PHP script in crontab only works when exporting to a file

On CentOS release 6.5 (Final):
I know that usually I just need to use the following command in crontab to run a php script.
0 * * * * /usr/local/bin/php absolute_path_file_to_the_script.php
But, recently, it stopped working. The only work around is to use the following command
0 * * * * /usr/local/bin/php absolute_path_file_to_the_script.php > log
But I would rather not to output anything to log for now.
So, I even tried
0 * * * * /bin/sh -c "/usr/local/bin/php absolute_path_file_to_the_script.php"
But the above commend is again not working in crontab (it works if I type in the shell directly).
And I am sure that the above command did run in crontab for a second with
ps ux, and then it stopped executing.
Any ideas on how to run the command properly without logging?

Try run that command (only php, without cron settings) from terminal and show result

Both answers from Marc and Greg work:
> /dev/null
or
> /dev/null 2>&1

AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Running Cron.d script, missing Environment Variables

I'm trying to run a PHP script that is triggered by a cron script (in cron.d). The script is triggered properly but it is missing the Elastic Beanstalk "Environment Variables" that are stored in the $_SERVER superglobal. The script is being run as the user "root" for now, but it's not in the same environment that has the environment variables. The variables are set correctly, if I run the script from a full shell it runs just fine.
Where are the "exports" for these variables? Where do they get set? I found the SetEnvs for Apache in /etc/apache/conf.d/aws_env.conf. I can't find anything in the user's .bashrc, .bash_profile, etc. Is there a workaround? A better way to do this?
Thanks.

While searching for solutions to the same problem I ran into this blog post: http://sebgoo.blogspot.nl/2013/10/elastic-beanstalk-cron-command-and-rds.html. To summarize, you can load the Elastic Beanstalk environment variables using the opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars file:
0 3 * * * . /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars; some_command
Hope this helps!

I just found this, using
grep -r "export MY_VAR" /
EDIT: Amazon seems to move the file location from time to time. Current location is:
/opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars
So I think I'll just include (source [file path]) that in my script before calling my php script. Still seems like a funky way to do things. I'm still in for better solutions.
I was running PHP via bash script triggered by cron. So to setup the environment, I would do something like this:
#!/bin/bash
source /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars
php -f my-script.php
See #userid53's answer below for PHP solution.

I spent several hours trying to figure out how to pass Environment Variables to PHP CLI. I tried:
setting in ebextensions config: $ source /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars.d/sysenv
setting all my Environment variables to config file.
No matter what I tried, env variables won't pass to PHP CLI.
When I log to my EC2 instance as ec2-user and do this: $ echo $ENVIRONMENT I get prod. If I do it as $ sudo su and then $ echo $ENVIRONMENT I get prod.
If I manually run the PHP CLI file (used in cronjob) my script works. When it runs automatically (via cronjob) Environment Variables are not passed to my script.
Here's what I did. Put this in your cronjob entry script:
$variables = '/opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars.d/sysenv';
if (file_exists($variables) && is_file($variables)) {
$contents = file_get_contents($variables);
foreach(explode("\n", $contents) as $line) {
if (empty($line)) continue;
$new_line = str_replace('export ', '', $line);
$first_part = strpos($new_line, '=');
$last_part = substr($new_line, $first_part, strlen($new_line));
$variable_value = str_replace(array('=', '"'), array('',''), $last_part);
$variable_name = substr($new_line, 0, $first_part);
putenv($variable_name."=".$variable_value);
}
}
It extracts each line from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars.d/sysenv file, removes the export part, gets the variable name & value, and sets it via putenv() function.

It's works for me with a Laravel Project
* * * * * root . /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars && /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/artisan schedule:run 1>> /dev/null 2>&1
For a non Laravel Project you can test that:
* * * * * root . /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars && /usr/bin/php /path/to/your/script.php 1>> /dev/null 2>&1
Hope this helps!

in version 3.0.3 it has changed again, use this to export your envars in command line
file="/opt/elasticbeanstalk/deployment/env"
while IFS=: read -r f1
do
export $f1
done <"$file"

I know this is an old thread but I recently needed to do something similar in a Node.js environment deployed on Elastic Beanstalk; for what I could tell, the file /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars is not present on Node.js environments. I ended up writing a Python script that loaded the environment variables from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/bin/get-config, and then executing my Node.js script from there.
The code I ended up using was:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import subprocess
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, call
import simplejson as json
envData = json.loads(Popen(['/opt/elasticbeanstalk/bin/get-config', 'environment'], stdout = PIPE).communicate()[0])
for k, v in envData.iteritems():
os.environ[k] = v
call(["babel-node", "/var/app/current/<script_name>.js"])
Hope this helps anyone needing to do the same.
For the complete configuration I deployed, you can refer to my original post How to set environment variables in Amazon Elastic Beanstalk when running a cron job (Node.js)

I added the following line to my shell script:
source /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars .bash_profile
So my script, which is executed by the crontab, looks like this:
#!/bin/sh
source /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars .bash_profile
# do some php stuff

In case you need something similar for CodeIgniter:
* * * * * root . /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars && /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/index.php controller method
Example:
* * * * * root . /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars && /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/index.php tasks pushNotification
A more descriptive alternative:
* * * * * root source /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars && /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/index.php tasks pushNotification

AWS and EBS are changing the location of the env vars from time to time. At the current time, I was able to retrieve the env vars from the following path (I've python EBS)
/opt/python/current/env

cron running php file which uses shell_exec and redis-cli

I have a cronjob that runs the following:
* * * * * php /path/to/phpfile.php >> /cronlog.txt
when I run the php file in bash everything works, but when the cronjob runs it, one command fails:
shell_exec("redis-cli ping"); and returns an error that sh: 1: redis-cli: not found
Does anyone know why the cron user using PHP shell_exec would not be able to use the redis-cli command?
update
git diff /env_term.txt /env_cron.txt
-SHELL=/bin/bash
-TERM=screen
-SSH_CLIENT=*************
-SSH_TTY=/dev/pts/0
-USER=root
-LS_COLORS=rs=0:di=01;34:ln=01;36:mh=00:pi=40;33:so=01;35:do=01;35:bd=40;33;01:cd=40;33;01:or=40;31;01:su=37;41:sg=30;43:ca=30;41:tw=30;42:ow=34;42:st=37;44:ex=01;32:*.
-TERMCAP= { a bunch of giberish }
-PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
-MAIL=/var/mail/root
-STY=*************
-PWD=*************
-LANG=en_US.UTF-8
-HOME=/root
-SHLVL=2
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
+HOME=/root
LOGNAME=root
-WINDOW=2
-SSH_CONNECTION=*************
-LESSOPEN=| /usr/bin/lesspipe %s
-LESSCLOSE=/usr/bin/lesspipe %s %s
-_=/usr/bin/env
+PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
+LANG=en_US.UTF-8
+SHELL=/bin/sh
+PWD=*************

Did you check if your PATH variable is the same when cron is called.
A quick check is to add a dummy cron job to output the current environment variables passed to cron:
* * * * * env > /tmp/env.out
And then compare this output with when you run the env command from the terminal

try this solution:
cat cronjob
* * * * * php /path/to/phpfile.php >> /path/to/cronlog.txt
Then:
chmod +x cronjob
/etc/init.d/crond start #redhat based servers like centos
/etc/init.d/cron start #debian based servers like ubuntu
crontab cronjob

You can give absolute path of redis-cli to avoid any such issue related to environment variable.

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