aws-cli 1.2.10 cron script fails

Question

I have a crontab that fires a PHP script that runs the AWS CLI command "aws ec2 create-snapshot".

When I run the script via the command line the php script completes successfully with the aws command returning a JSON string to PHP. But when I setup a crontab to run the php script the aws command doesn't return anything.

The crontab is running as the same user as when I run the PHP script on the command line myself, so I am a bit stumped?

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 23 '14 at 12:39

6

I had the same problem with running a ruby script (ruby script.rb). I replace ruby by its full path (/sources/ruby-2.0.0-p195/ruby) and it worked. in you case, replace "aws" by its full path. to find it: find / -name "aws"

answered Jan 23 '14 at 12:39

Walid Da.

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Awesome thank you very much! That was exactly it, to the letter. I was stuck on that for two hours. – Theo Kouzelis Jan 23 '14 at 12:53

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 16 '15 at 22:36

The reason it's necessary to specify the full path to the aws command is because cron by default runs with a very limited environment. I ran into this problem as well, and debugged it by adding this to the cron script:

set | sort > /tmp/environment.txt

I then ran the script via cron and via command line (renaming the environment file between runs) and compared them. This led me to see that I needed to set both the PATH and the AWS_DEFAULT_REGION environment variables. After doing this the script worked just fine.

Thanks for sharing your debug method – Theo Kouzelis Feb 17 '15 at 08:53 — Theo Kouzelis, Feb 17 '15 at 08:53

aws-cli 1.2.10 cron script fails

2 Answers2