I have a problem getting a cron job to run (properly).
I created a (very large, but whittled down to nothing) php page that calls mail()
<?
mail('[email protected]', 'subject', 'test');
mail('[email protected]', 'subject', 'test');
?>
Then I created my cron job, which runs the file. The line of code in crontab -e is as follows:
12 0 * * * /opt/lampp/bin/php /opt/lampp/htdocs/atlantis/application/controllers/cron.php
If I run the command /opt/lampp/bin/php /opt/lampp/htdocs/atlantis/application/controllers/cron.php from terminal, I get an email sent to myself. However, if I run the same line from a cron job, it does not work.
My next stop was to check the logs. I'm running Ubuntu with sSMTP.
Apr 16 11:49:17 drew-Virtual crontab[4722]: (drew) END EDIT (drew) //EDITED CRON
//Calling cron.php file from terminal
Apr 16 11:49:31 drew-Virtual sSMTP[4791]: Creating SSL connection to host
Apr 16 11:49:32 drew-Virtual sSMTP[4791]: SSL connection using RSA_AES_128_CBC_SHA1
Apr 16 11:49:34 drew-Virtual sSMTP[4791]: Sent mail for drew@drew-Virtual (221 ip-173-201-180-143.ip.secureserver.net closing connection) uid=1000 username=drew outbytes=444
Apr 16 11:49:34 drew-Virtual sSMTP[4794]: Creating SSL connection to host
Apr 16 11:49:35 drew-Virtual sSMTP[4794]: SSL connection using RSA_AES_128_CBC_SHA1
Apr 16 11:49:37 drew-Virtual sSMTP[4794]: Sent mail for drew@drew-Virtual (221 ip-173-201-180-143.ip.secureserver.net closing connection) uid=1000 username=drew outbytes=454
//I successfully received 2 emails, one to my work account, one to my personal account
//Calling cron.php from cron
Apr 16 11:50:01 drew-Virtual cron[857]: (drew) RELOAD (crontabs/drew)
Apr 16 11:51:01 drew-Virtual CRON[4808]: (drew) CMD (/opt/lampp/bin/php /opt/lampp/htdocs/atlantis/application/controllers/chron.php)
Apr 16 11:51:01 drew-Virtual sSMTP[4810]: Creating SSL connection to host
Apr 16 11:51:02 drew-Virtual sSMTP[4810]: SSL connection using RSA_AES_128_CBC_SHA1
Apr 16 11:51:04 drew-Virtual sSMTP[4810]: Sent mail for drew@drew-Virtual (221 ip-173-201-180-143.ip.secureserver.net closing connection) uid=1000 username=drew outbytes=698
//I did not receive any emails
You can see it only tries to send 1 email, and I assume fails as I never receive it. However, it doesn't tell me why it failed, nor do I have any other clues. I also noticed that the outbytes is larger in the cron job than it is from the command line.
Lastly, the php file has full rwx permissions, for everyone.
The issue was that PHP was running as an apache module, rather than PHP-CGI. I suppose as a work-around I could have used something like
lynx -dump http://www.somedomain.com/cron.php
For my use, I ended up installing php5-cli and then simply changing the cron job to
php /path/to/file.php
fixed it.