CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi everyone,

I'm having a problem with mail processing cron jobs and would be grateful for advice. Thanks!
I am on drupal 6, civicrm 3.4.7, plesk.

I have been trying to figure out how to get the recommended shell script working in cron to process mail, and am getting the following notification from cron:

Error: Could not create directory: /path/to/httpdocs/files.<p>If you have moved an existing CiviCRM installation from one location or server to another there are several steps you will need to follow. They are detailed on this CiviCRM wiki page - <a href="http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Moving+an+Existing+Installation+to+a+New+Server+or+Location"  target="_blank" title="Opens documentation in a new window.">Moving an Existing Installation to a New Server or Location</a>. A fix for the specific problem that caused this error message to be displayed is to set the value of the config_backend column in the civicrm_domain table to NULL. However we strongly recommend that you review and follow all the steps in that document.</p>

I explored those instructions but I think for my problem this is not the solution, but rather I am suspecting a permissions issue. Which user should cron be running under? I tried a bunch of them on my plesk system (apache, psaadm, root) and all of them give this same error.

My crontab is below, with the shell scripts commented out and the wget method currently active and working.

Cheers,

Tobias

-- cut here --

# This must be set to the directory where civicrm is installed.
CIVI_ROOT='/path/to/httpdocs/sites/all/modules/civicrm'


# Comment: I believe these two lines are unnecessary.
# USER=www-data
MAILTO=foo@bar.org


# Location of the PHP Command Line Interface binary.
# nice -19 forces to run at a lower priority than the web server
PHP=nice -n19 /usr/bin/php


# line to be modified according to the informations below
# like this: PARAMS= -s<default or domain> -u<user> -p<password>
PARAMS= -s<domain> -u<user> -p<pass>


# cronjob send
# m h dom mon dow command
# */5 * * * * cd $CIVI_ROOT; $PHP bin/civimail.cronjob.php $PARAMS
*/5 *   * * * wget 'http://www.kabissa.org/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/civimail.cronjob.php?name=<name>&pass=<pass>&key=<key>'
# */15 * * * * cd $CIVI_ROOT; $PHP bin/EmailProcessor.php $PARAMS
*/15 * * * * wget 'http://www.kabissa.org/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/EmailProcessor.php?name=<name>&pass=<pass>&key=<key>'
52 * * * * wget -q http://www.kabissa.org/cron.php

thanks for the quick reply! I actually did do this but munged it in my post to the forum.

sorry if this is getting confusing. I had munged it in the error also. Here's the original error followed by the original cron with the email/user/password/key info munged.

-- cut here --

Error: Could not create directory: /var/www/vhosts/kabissa.org/httpdocs/files.<p>If you have moved an existing CiviCRM installation from one location or server to another there are several steps you will need to follow. They are detailed on this CiviCRM wiki page - <a href="http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Moving+an+Existing+Installation+to+a+New+Server+or+Location"  target="_blank" title="Opens documentation in a new window.">Moving an Existing Installation to a New Server or Location</a>. A fix for the specific problem that caused this error message to be displayed is to set the value of the config_backend column in the civicrm_domain table to NULL. However we strongly recommend that you review and follow all the steps in that document.</p>

-- cut here --

# This must be set to the directory where civicrm is installed.
CIVI_ROOT='/var/www/vhosts/kabissa.org/httpdocs/sites/all/modules/civicrm'


# Comment: I believe these two lines are unnecessary.
# USER=www-data
MAILTO=<email>


# Location of the PHP Command Line Interface binary.
# nice -19 forces to run at a lower priority than the web server
PHP=nice -n19 /usr/bin/php


# line to be modified according to the informations below
# like this: PARAMS= -s<default or domain> -u<user> -p<password>
PARAMS= -<domain> -<user> -<pass>


# cronjob send
# m h dom mon dow command
# */5 * * * * cd $CIVI_ROOT; $PHP bin/civimail.cronjob.php $PARAMS
*/5 *   * * * wget -O - -q -t 1 'http://www.kabissa.org/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/civimail.cronjob.php?name=<user>&pass=<pass>&key=<key>'
# */15 * * * * cd $CIVI_ROOT; $PHP bin/EmailProcessor.php $PARAMS
*/15 * * * * wget -O - -q -t 1 'http://www.kabissa.org/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/EmailProcessor.php?name=<user>&pass=<pass>&key=<key>'
52 * * * * wget -q http://www.kabissa.org/cron.php

yes - that path exists already.

yes, the wget method works.

i want to change it because it's possible to set the cron job at a lower priority than web processes, and it also makes me uneasy to have the login user/pass being constantly recorded in apache log files and in emails. it's recommended in the docs as well.

maybe i will leave it as it is for now and revisit this at the next civi upgrade.

thanks for thinking this through with me.

-t

i want to change it because it's possible to set the cron job at a lower priority than web processes

This can be an issue if your server is overloaded, yes.

it also makes me uneasy to have the login user/pass being constantly recorded in apache log files and in emails.

If a hacker has access to your Apache logs, then he has access to your settings.php anyway so it makes no difference really that the user/pass are in the logs, IMO.

As far as emails, you should disable that.

it's recommended in the docs as well.

Yes, Xavier prefers it.

well, that's exciting - switching the cron user to apache seems to have done the trick. It runs now without any email notifications. I also changed the ownership of the files folder to kabissa:psaadm which on my server is readable by the web server. So I will watch it and let you know if I learn anything new, but permissions seems to be the issue in this case.

Cheers,

Tobias

well, i would prefer it too if that's the case!

unfortunately I checked it again this morning and I am getting the same notification errors again, so have switched back to wget method.