Problem with cronjob and ruby script

[Matthew Lagace]

Hello,

I'm trying to get a ruby script run into a crontab and it keeps failing
saying it can't find my mechanize gem. When I run the script form the
command line, everything runs fine and I don't get any failures.

Anyone ever had that problem before?

 

[David Rio]

Hello,

I'm trying to get a ruby script run into a crontab and it keeps failing
saying it can't find my mechanize gem. When I run the script form the
command line, everything runs fine and I don't get any failures.

Anyone ever had that problem before?

Make sure you have this ENV variables pointing to the correct dirs:

GEM_HOME=/usr/local/rubygems/gems
GEM_PATH=/usr/local/rubygems/gems
RUBYLIB=/usr/local/rubygems/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8

-drd

 

[Eddie Corns]

Hello,

I'm trying to get a ruby script run into a crontab and it keeps failing
saying it can't find my mechanize gem. When I run the script form the
command line, everything runs fine and I don't get any failures.

Often and often when cron jobs fail it is because the environment variables
are not set. Cron jobs do not automatically execute .bashrc (or equivalent)
you generally need to create a script that calls your program after either
setting the environment by hand or doing eg ". .bashrc".

Eddie

 

[Bil Kleb]

Hello,
Hi.

I'm trying to get a ruby script run into a crontab and it keeps failing
saying it can't find my mechanize gem. When I run the script form the
command line, everything runs fine and I don't get any failures.

Anyone ever had that problem before?

Oh yes.

Try getting it to run from the command line with a blank
environment with 'env -', e.g.,

% env - run_stuff.sh

Typically a crontab job runs with a much reduced environment.

Alternatively, stick a printenv in your crontab to see
what environment it is working with and compare to your
interactive environment.

You might also find crontab's sister command, 'at', helpful
to get tighter feedback cycles.

Regards,

 

[James French]

Hi,

If I start by a human-written block of data, such as ITEMS below, is it pos=
sible to deserialize these into objects of type Item? How might this be don=
e?

Thanks for any help,
James


ITEMS =3D %q{
---
item:
- name: blah
- type: blah
- location: blah
}

class Item

attr_accessor :name
attr_accessor :type
attr_accessor :location
=20
def initialize
@name =3D ""
@type =3D ""
@location =3D ""
end
=20
end

 

[Matthew Lagace]

Hmm I've tried running with a blank environment and it fails with the
same error not finding the gems. I have set the ENV variables to the
proper directories and it is still giving me the same error. I'm not
sure what else to try although I appreciate all your recommendations!

 

[Hassan Schroeder]

Hmm I've tried running with a blank environment and it fails with the
same error not finding the gems. I have set the ENV variables to the
proper directories and it is still giving me the same error.

Set them *where*? You need to set them in your crontab directly,
*not* in your personal e.g. .bashrc.

 

[Matthew Lagace]

Oh I see can you give me an example please?

Thanks!

 

[Charles Johnson]

Oh I see can you give me an example please?

Thanks!

You may find this helpful: http://blog.spikesource.com/crontab.htm

Cheers--

Charles

 

[Kyle Schmitt]

Oh I see can you give me an example please?

Thanks!

From (recent) experience here, I've had similar issues across
different versions of the same distro (CentOS/RedHat). The paths and
environment variables are drastically different. For me, I was
shelling out to lspci

Something along the lines of this would have been a valid fix.

#Crontab
0 1 * * * PATH=$PATH:/sbin /usr/bin/ruby /usr/local/bin/nitejob.rb

 

[Hassan Schroeder]

Oh I see can you give me an example please?

Sure, here's one:

5,20,35,50 * * * * export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jdk1.6_013 &&
/usr/bin/jruby - S blah blah

HTH,

 

[Kyle Schmitt]

Sure, here's one:

5,20,35,50 * * * * export JAVA_HOME=3D/usr/local/jdk1.6_013 =C2=A0&&
/usr/bin/jruby - S blah blah

HTH,

Hassan, just a note, you don't need the "export" part of the line

--Kyle

 

[Kyle Schmitt]

Hassan, just a note, you don't need the "export" part of the line

--Kyle

Of course it doesn't hurt either....

 

[Hassan Schroeder]

Hassan, just a note, you don't need the "export" part of the line

Force of habit; in this example, no, but if a subsequent part of the
entry spawns a new shell, I think it's necessary.

I think. Will have to revisit that sometime, but not today

--=20
Hassan Schroeder ------------------------ (e-mail address removed)

 

[Matthew Lagace]

Tried everything in here and same problem. What I've noticed though this
version of Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn 7.04) which I know is outdated messed up
all the paths for ruby and rubygems.

 

[Hassan Schroeder]

Tried everything in here and same problem. What I've noticed though this
version of Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn 7.04) which I know is outdated messed up
all the paths for ruby and rubygems.

Shouldn't matter if you put in full paths to everything you reference.

 

[Joel VanderWerf]

Hi,

If I start by a human-written block of data, such as ITEMS below, is it possible to deserialize these into objects of type Item? How might this be done?

Easy, just yaml them to find out how the serialized form should look:

class Item

attr_accessor :name
attr_accessor :type
attr_accessor :location

def initialize
@name = ""
@type = ""
@location = ""
end

end

require 'yaml'
y Item.new


If you run this you get:

--- !ruby/object:Item
location: ""
name: ""
type: ""


Then you can play with the string and check that YAML.load does the
right thing on this data

 

[Xeno Campanoli]

Tried everything in here and same problem. What I've noticed though this
version of Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn 7.04) which I know is outdated messed up
all the paths for ruby and rubygems.

Hey, does this thread have anything to do with the Bourne-shell usage bias which
first manifested itself for me in at last year? In other words, if you use a
shell, any shell, in at you get sh, not bash, the former being considered
lighter weight and perhaps somehow safer and more standard, but on the other
hand breaks things like some commands you are used to in some syntax in Bash.
For instance, you must do the following to export:

x=y
export x

because export x=y does not work in sh. ???

 

[Matthew Lagace]

I honestly don't know, I've tried everything in here and I still can't
get it to work.

 

[Hassan Schroeder]

I honestly don't know, I've tried everything in here and I still can't
get it to work.

Maybe if you post the actual crontab entry that you're having trouble
with, we'd have a chance of finding the specific problem