CV Scheduled jobs not firing from cron

Question

I am attempting to use CV to call job.execute to run my scheduled tasks as described in the CiviCRM Documentation. I am using Drupal 7. I have several independent sites running on the server.

It works fine when I call it manually (for each site):

sudo cv api job.execute --user=admin --cwd=/var/www/html/siteroot

The tasks also work when I call them manually from the UI (for all sites)

Crontab is set up with the following:

*/5 * * * * cv api job.execute --user=admin --cwd=/var/www/html/siteroot

the syslog shows no problems and that the cron fires (example output):

Nov  1 10:15:01 live CRON[8991]: (root) CMD (cv api job.execute --user=admin --cwd=/var/www/html/siteroot)

However,

the scheduled tasks appear to not be running. I have configured several to run "whenever cron is run" but they still do not run unless I fire them manually.

Is there something I am missing? Is there a log in Civi where I can see if the command is being received?

I am using Drupal 7, php7.0, CiviCRM 5.3 on Ubuntu 16.04

Answer 1

Ok so this may seem like a silly issue to some but after some messing around I figured out cron didn't have access to the path where CV was installed so to fix it the crontab entry had to be changed to:

*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/cv api job.execute --user=admin --cwd=/var/www/html/siteroot

There was no error as the mailer deamon was not firing correctly so no error was being sent or logged.

Cron does not generally have access to the path that a shell root user does, which is why running the command cv as root works just fine.

Answer 2

Is the user "admin" defined in Drupal? If not some commands will not fire under cv. cv needs a user under "username" that is recognized by Drupal as having the rights to fire the command you're interested in. I had this same issue myself which was fixed by identifying an authorized Drupal user.