Running a jake task as a Cronjob

[cometbalan]

Consider the below jake task

namespace('test', function () {
  desc('Task to generate General invite code');
  task('cron', function (general_ic) {
    console.log("DATA SUCCESS");    
  });
});

I can able to execute this task when i run this like (with absolute path for jake and the jake file)

/home/balan/local/bin/jake -f /home/path/to_project/jake-file.js test:cron > /home/balan/out.txt

But when i add the below code in a crontab, this is not working. I have checked the cron log, this task is actually initiated, but there is no output. (every minute once)

* * * * * /home/balan/local/bin/jake -f /home/path/to_project/jake-file.js test:cron > /home/balan/out.txt

[mde]

What directory are you currently in when you run the task manually?

[mde]

What directory should the task run in? Is it possibly a permissions issue?

[cometbalan]

I am running the jake task directly under my project directory. Below is the structure

my_project/app
my_project/jake/test-jakefile.js

The task runs even when i go to home directory (cd ~) and give absolute path for both jake and the jakefile.

What i found was, the PATH variable loaded during a cron seems not to have all the actual PATH information. I created a shell file (.sh) and added the PATH info as like below

PATH="/usr/local/rbenv/shims:/usr/local/rbenv/bin:/usr/local/rbenv/shims:/usr/local/rbenv/bin:/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/home/balan/local/bin:/home/balan/local/bin:/home/balan/local/bin:/home/balan/local/bin"

///jake invoke here

and add this .sh file to the cronjob, and it worked.

But i am wondering if there is a clean way to do this?

[mde]

If I understand you correctly, the problem is that the Jake executable isn't in the PATH of the cron user. You can actually run Jake via the cli.js script -- the jake executable is really just a symlink to that path. If you've installed it globally, it's probably at /usr/local/lib/node_modules/jake/bin/cli.js.