Running a cron job through PHP/Apache?!

[razta]

Hello all,

I have a PHP script which makes a cron file from user input. When i try to run the cron job via system() the job doesn't run, I suspect it has something to do with permissions. Any ideas on how I would go about getting this to work?

 

Here is the system() call:

echo $scriptOutput = system('crontab ' . $cronFile, $retval);

 

Thank you in advance for your help.

 

 

[abazoskib]

Try shell_exec(), otherwise if it is a permission problem, then you can't do anything until you have permission.

[trq]

The user your server runs under (eg; www-data) wouldn't normally have permissions to create cron jobs. Do you have shell access and permissions enough to create users on this machine?

[razta]

@abazoskib no joy with shell_exec()

 

@thorpe Yes I do. Its a development machine I have on my network. Any idea what permissions Apache should have? Wouldn't giving it more permissions be a security issue?

 

Thanks for your replys!

 

 

[trq]

@abazoskib no joy with shell_exec()

 

@thorpe Yes I do. Its a development machine I have on my network. Any idea what permissions Apache should have? Wouldn't giving it more permissions be a security issue?

 

Thanks for your replys!

 

 

 

You best option would likely be to create  a new user that can create cronjobs. You would then need to setup sudo to enable the apache user to su to this user without being promted for a password. Once that is setup you could execute something like.....

 

sudo -u yourcronuser crontab $file

 

You could also look at crontab's -u option (of course apache would need permissions to use this).

 

The other option might simply be to add the apache user to the /etc/cron.allow file but I'm not sure that is the safest idea.

[razta]

Thanks for the reply. I will try a couple of your options and see if I can get something working.

 

I will leave this topic unsolved for now as I may have further questions.

 

Thanks again!

[razta]

Hello all,

Still having problems trying to get this to work.

 

I created a user called 'cron' and give it root privs and a blank password.

 

PHP under the user 'nodoby' creates the cron file and then tries to add it to the user cron's crontab.

echo $scriptOutput = shell_exec('sudo crontab -u cron ' . $cronFile);

 

The cron file is being made and with the correct formatting however it is not being added to the user cron's crontab.

 

Any ideas? Thanks again!

[trq]

You issuing a call to sudo which means your trying to execute crontab as root. You need to sudo to the 'cron' user. eg;

 

echo $scriptOutput = shell_exec('sudo -u cron crontab ' . $cronFile);

 

ps: Giving the cron user a blannk password probably isn't the best idea. You need to configure sudo to enable 'nobody' to sudo as 'cron' without the use of a password.

[razta]

Finally got it working! It was a problem with file/folder permissions in the end, just had to chmod 777 the files/folders that the web app needed access to.

 

A tip for anyone doing the same:

Output the cron job results to a file for debugging, i.e. "* * * * * yourcommand > output.txt"

 

Thank you all for your help!