bundle exec not working with crontab

Question

I'm trying to execute the following shell script using crontab:

#!/bin/sh
cd /mnt/voylla-production/current
bundle exec rake maintenance:last_2_days_orders
bundle exec rake maintenance:send_last_2_days_payment_dropouts

The crontab entry is

0 16 * * * /mnt/voylla-production/releases/20131031003111/voylla_scripts/cj_4pm.sh

I'm getting the following error message in the mail:

/mnt/voylla-staging/current/voylla_scripts/cj_4pm.sh: line 3: bundle: command not found
/mnt/voylla-staging/current/voylla_scripts/cj_4pm.sh: line 4: bundle: command not found

I dont get the error when I run the commands manually. Not sure what's going on here. Could someone please point out.

Thanks

Answer 1

A nice trick to get all environment properly set up in crontab is to use /bin/bash -l :

0 16 * * * /bin/bash -l -c '/mnt/voylla-production/releases/20131031003111/voylla_scripts/cj_4pm.sh'

The -l option will invoke a full login shell, thus reading your bashrc file and any path / rvm setting it performs.

If you want to simplify your crontab management and use this trick - as well as others - without having to think about them, you can use the Whenever gem. It also play very nice with capistrano, if you use it, regenerating crontab on deploy.

Answer 2

The user used by cron does not have the correct environment. You can tell cron which user to use. For a bash script, you can so something like:

#!/bin/bash --login
source /home/user/.bashrc
rvm use 2.0.0@gemset #if you use rvm
cd /path/to/project && bundle exec xyz