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This question is intended to serve as an information post for others to find, since I fortunately already discovered a solution.

I tried to run a Wordpress-CLI command as a cron-job in crontab on a Cloudways server. The command runs without any issues directly in the terminal, but fails with a Fatal PHP Error when started with crontab.

The base command for the Wordpress-CLI looks like this:

wp migratedb profile [id]

Since the context in which crontab runs is generally unknown and the $PATH variable might not be available, I modified the command to provide the necessary absolute paths:

/usr/local/bin/wp migratedb profile [id] --path=/absolute/path/to/wordpress/core/files

Again, this modified command runs also perfectly without any issues when started from the terminal.

The final crontab entry looks something like this:

0 5 * * * /usr/local/bin/wp migratedb profile [id] --path=/absolute/path/to/wordpress/core/files

When run from the scheduler, it but produces the following error:

PHP Fatal error:  require(): Failed opening required 'wp-salt.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/php') in phar:///usr/local/bin/wp/vendor/wp-cli/config-command/src/Config_Command.php(444) : eval()'d code on line 34

After some experimenting, I realized that this error happens for all WP-CLI commands, except the very basic

wp --info

, which produces the following output:

OS: Linux 4.19.0-21-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.249-2 (2022-06-30) x86_64
Shell:  /bin/sh
PHP binary: /usr/bin/php7.4
PHP version:    7.4.33
php.ini used:   /etc/php/7.4/cli/php.ini
MySQL binary:   /usr/bin/mysql
MySQL version:  mysql  Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.4.20-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 5.2
SQL modes:  
WP-CLI root dir:    phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli
WP-CLI vendor dir:  phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor
WP_CLI phar path:   [absolute/path/to/user/home/directory]
WP-CLI packages dir:    
WP-CLI cache dir:   [absolute/path/to/user/home/directory]/.wp-cli/cache
WP-CLI global config:   
WP-CLI project config:  
WP-CLI version: 2.7.1

I also tried the following adaptions without any luck:

  • Downloading a fresh wp-cli.phar and using it for the command.

  • Reviewing and changing all permissions of used folders

  • Trying to run the cronjob as a different user

  • Changing the command by using /usr/bin/php to run the wp-cli.phar

mi-aluanich
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1 Answers1

3

I finally figured out that this error has to do with the way the hosting provider (in this instance Cloudways) is setting up the Wordpress configuration in the wp-config.php file.

The salts and secret authorization keys are stored in a separate file, namely the wp-salt.php which is referenced in the error message. It is directly referenced in the config file in the following way: require('wp-salt.php'). Since this is not part of the wordpress core and crontab runs in a different environment it is not able to determine the correct directory that file is in and the require() fails with a fatal error.

To fix it, change the line in the wp-config.php to require(__DIR__.'/wp-salt.php');, so that the file is always referenced from the same directory as the config file.

Another option would be to remove the line altogether and replace it with the contents from the wp-salt.php file, as the Wordpress core does.

mi-aluanich
  • 31
  • 2