WordPress cron?

sugeneris

This should be rudimentary and yet. There's basically no mention of cron in the support docs at all so I don't know if I'm not getting a local quirk or something.

I'm working on moving away from WebFaction, etc. and my existing cron line for WordPress no longer works.
wp-cron.php is at 644(as previous) and the command used to look like 00,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/local/bin/php $HOME/webapps/foo/wp-cron.php

Working from the single example of backing up a database in the docs, I've stripped this to 00,15,30,45 * * * * $HOME/apps/foo/wp-cron.php (because including the php location/editing to /usr/bin/php also did nothing) and get permission denied. Setting the file to 755 out of curiosity allows it to execute at least but spews a bunch of errors and the WP jobs still don't run.

What am I missing here? I'm feeling pretty stupid right now but it's also late and I'm trying to absorb a bunch of new information. If it makes any sort of difference this is a manual WordPress setup and not whatever the control panel installer does.

sean

sugeneris

We haven't written any special docs for cron yet because there is nothing special about cron on Opalstack, ie it works exactly like it does on a WebFaction server or any Linux system.

Your cron job should work if you use the full path to PHP. The various versions are:

PHP 5.6: /usr/bin/php56
PHP 7.3: /usr/bin/php
PHP 7.4: /usr/bin/php74
PHP 8.0: /usr/bin/php80

I'll ask our sysadmin to set up PHP symlinks in /usr/local/bin to help cron jobs from WF work as expected.

In the meantime, please contact support to let us know the shell user that's having this problem. We'll then be able to check the cron logs and help you determine why your job isn't running. Thanks!

sugeneris

sean I figured as much. And of course after just letting it sit overnight, it seems like it's run properly once so far. I'm going to let it go another couple cycles(it's on a 4hr schedule) to be sure but at this point it looks like I'll be deleting this thread. Sorry to bug. I'm a bit scattered getting acclimated and compiling a bunch of clients that need to be moved.

009co

sean Would this be same for Python eg /usr/local/bin/python3.7 etc?

sean

sugeneris No bother at all, and no need to delete the thread, please! It's useful to have all of these problems documented out here in the open so that other customers can benefit 🙂

sugeneris

Yeah, this is behaving now. No idea what the deal was with the permissions errors but I'll take it. I've got plenty else to move over and see if it happens again.

sean

sugeneris No idea what the deal was with the permissions errors

"permission denied" when cron tries to execute 00,15,30,45 * * * * $HOME/apps/foo/wp-cron.php means that the file wp-cron.php is not an executable script on its own. You need to invoke it with the PHP interpreter as shown elsewhere in this thread.

sean

009co any command you execute via cron needs to be a valid command.

In your example /usr/local/bin/python3.7 won't work because we don't have Python 3.7 installed on our platform.

The system Python3 is /usr/bin/python3.6. If you need a different Python then you can install one and point your cron job at that: HOWTO install a newer (or older) version of Python