CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I just upgraded from 3.4.8 to 4.1.1 under drupal 6.  No problem for normal access through the http forms & such.

I'm having trouble getting the cron.php to run the job stuff.

A peculiarity of the site is that its using a profile-run site (aquia commons to be exact) so the civicrm distribution bin is in /.../profiles/drupal_commons/contrib/civicrm/, not the usual /.../sites/modules/civicrm/

when I try to do it by getting 'http://XXX/profiles/drupal_commons/modules/contrib/civicrm/bin/cron.php?name=YYY&pass=ZZZ&key=site-key', I get this error:

Could not find valid configuration dir, best guess: /.../profiles/drupal_commons/modules/contrib/civicrm/../../sites
   If this is a standalone installation (i.e. not a Drupal or Joomla module) and you'd like to re-initialize it, click here.

I tried linking the real 'sites' directory where it expected it, but it didn't help.  It should be looking in .../sites/default for the config file anyway.

I've never worked with the new job scheduler and I'm not sure how much of this is me requesting the wrong url, or if my configuration is broken.  Is there a way to specify the proper custom path explicitly?  I didn't see it in the directories form.

Yes.  In the end the simplest solution was to meet CiviCRM's expectation.  I moved the CiviCRM module top directory to the location the error message indicated and all was well.

Depending as it does on backtrack paths (ie ../../whatever/X.php) the CiviCRM code in the cron stuff is sensitive to absolute directory structures and can get confused by logical link tricks if it backtracks above the root module directory.  I modified the relevant CiviCRM files to deduce internal file locations from a different authority, and it worked.  But it was clear that it would be too difficult to maintain since any package update would clobber the changes I'd made.  So I chickened out and put the package where the package assumed it would be.

I don't know about D7, but with D6 & D5 the module aspect is fully contained under the root subdirectory its in and so is immune to any logical link jiggery-pokery I need to make other things work so satisfying CiviCRM's stricktish needs doesn't harm it's drupal functionality.

I wasn't aware of this.  Thanks for bringing it to my attention.  I'll probably use it in the next upgrade.

Since a lot of constants are defined in civicrm.settings.php I expect CIVICRM_CONFDIR could be defined there as well, its just that it doesn't usually need to be & so isn't there.

But the problem I found was that the crontab tasks thing backtracked above the link and couldn't find its way back down.  I'm not sure redefining CONFDIR would solve that.