Where can I set environment variables that crontab will use

Question

I have a crontab running every hour  The user running it has environment variabless in the  bash profile that work when the user runs the job from the terminal  however  obviously these don t get picked up by crontab when it runs   I ve tried setting them in  profile and  bashrc but they still don t seem to get picked up  Does anyone know where I can put environment vars that crontab can pick up

User · Answer

If you start the scripts you are executing through cron with      bin bash -l   They should pick up your    bash profile environment variables

User · Answer

Instead of   0              sh  my script sh   Use bash -l -c  0              bash -l -c  sh  my script sh

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Expanding on  carestad example  which I find easier  is to run the script with cron and have the environment in the script   In crontab -e file   SHELL  bin bash    1          HOME cron job sh   In cron job sh file      bin bash source  HOME  bash profile some other cmd   Any command after the source of  bash profile will have your environment as if you logged in

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Have  cron  run a shell script that sets the environment before running the command   Always            Id  crontab v 4 2 2007 09 17 02 41 00 jleffler Exp       Crontab file for Home Directory for Jonathan Leffler  JL   -----------------------------------------------------------------------------  Min     Hour    Day     Month   Weekday Command  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0                                         usr bin ksh  work1 jleffler bin Cron hourly 1        1                                usr bin ksh  work1 jleffler bin Cron daily 23       1                       1-5      usr bin ksh  work1 jleffler bin Cron weekday 2        3                       0        usr bin ksh  work1 jleffler bin Cron weekly 21       3       1                        usr bin ksh  work1 jleffler bin Cron monthly   The scripts in   bin Cron are all links to a single script   runcron   which looks like             Id  runcron sh v 2 1 2001 02 27 00 53 22 jleffler Exp              Commands to be performed by Cron  no debugging options           Set environment -- not done by cron  usually switches HOME     HOME  cronfile  base  basename  0  cmd   REAL HOME - real home  bin  base  if     -x  cmd   then cmd   HOME  bin  base fi  exec  cmd               Written using an older coding standard - nowadays  I d use a shebang      at the start    The     cronfile  is a variation on my profile for use by cron - rigorously non-interactive and no echoing for the sake of being noisy   You could arrange to execute the  profile and so on instead    The REAL HOME stuff is an artefact of my environment - you can pretend it is the same as  HOME    So  this code reads the appropriate environment and then executes the non-Cron version of the command from my home directory   So  for example  my  weekday  command looks like                 Id  weekday sh v 1 10 2007 09 17 02 42 03 jleffler Exp              Commands to be done each weekday    Update ICSCOPE n updics   The  daily  command is simpler                 Id  daily sh v 1 5 1997 06 02 22 04 21 johnl Exp              Commands to be done daily    Nothing -- most things are done on weekdays only  exit 0

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Expanding on  Robert Brisita has just expand   also if you don t want to set up all the variables of the profile in the script   you can select the variables to export on the top of the script  In crontab -e file   SHELL  bin bash    1          Path to script script sh   In script sh     bin bash export JAVA HOME  path to jdk  some-other-command

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All the above solutions work fine  It will create issues when there are any special characters in your environment variable  I have found the solution  eval   printenv   awk -F    print  quot export  quot   quot   quot  quot  1 quot   quot  quot  quot   quot  quot   quot  quot  2 quot   quot  quot      gt  gt   etc profile

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Another way - inspired by this this answer - to  quot inject quot  variables is the following  fcron example    daily 00 12       set -a           path to file containing vars        set  a         path to script using vars  From help set   -a  Mark variables which are modified or created for export  Using   rather than - causes these flags to be turned off   So everything in between set - and set   gets exported to env and is then available for other scripts  etc  Without using set the variables get sourced but live in set only  Aside from that it s also useful to pass variables when a program requires a non-root account to run but you d need some variables inside that other user s environment  Below is an example passing in nullmailer vars to format the e-mail header  su -s  bin bash -c  quot set -a                           path to nullmailer-vars                        set  a                         usr sbin logcheck quot  logcheck

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For me I had to set the environment variable for a php application  I resloved it by adding the following code to my crontab     sudo  crontab -e   crontab   ENVIRONMENT VAR production             home deploy my app cron cron doSomethingWonderful php   and inside doSomethingWonderful php I could get the environment value with    lt  php      echo   SERVER  ENVIRONMENT VAR        gt   production    I hope this helps

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Set Globally env  sudo sh -c  quot echo MY GLOBAL ENV TO MY CURRENT DIR   pwd  quot   gt  gt   etc environment quot    Add scheduled job to start a script  crontab -e      5         sh -c  quot  MY GLOBAL ENV TO MY CURRENT DIR start sh quot

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Whatever you set in crontab will be available in the cronjobs  both directly and using the variables in the scripts   Use them in the definition of the cronjob  You can configure crontab so that it sets variables that then the can cronjob use     crontab -l myvar  hi man            echo   myvar  date is   date    gt  gt   tmp hello   Now the file  tmp hello shows things like     cat  tmp hello  hi man  date is Thu May 12 12 10 01 CEST 2016 hi man  date is Thu May 12 12 11 01 CEST 2016   Use them in the script run by cronjob  You can configure crontab so that it sets variables that then the scripts can use     crontab -l myvar  hi man             bin bash  tmp myscript sh   And say script  tmp myscript sh is like this   echo  Now is   date   myvar  myvar   gt  gt   tmp myoutput res   It generates a file  tmp myoutput res showing     cat  tmp myoutput res Now is Thu May 12 12 07 01 CEST 2016  myvar hi man Now is Thu May 12 12 08 01 CEST 2016  myvar hi man

User · Answer

Unfortunately  crontabs have a very limited environment variables scope  thus you need to export them every time the corntab runs  An easy approach would be the following example  suppose you ve your env vars in a file called env  then                env  amp  amp   path to your command this part     env will export them and then they re used within the same scope of your command

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You can also prepend your command with env to inject Environment variables like so   0           env VARIABLE VALUE  usr bin mycommand

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Setting vars in  etc environment also worked for me in Ubuntu  As of 12 04  variables in  etc environment are loaded for cron

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I m using Oh-my-zsh in my macbook so I ve tried many things to get the crontab task runs but finally  my solution was prepending the  zshrc before the command to run     30            HOME  zshrc  node  path for my script js   This task runs every 30 minutes and uses  zshrc profile to execute my node command   Don t forget to use the dot before the  HOME var

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I tried most of the provided solutions  but nothing worked at first  It turns out  though  that it wasn t the solutions that failed to work  Apparently  my    bashrc file starts with the following block of code   case  - in      i             return   esac   This basically is a case statement that checks the current set of options in the current shell to determine that the shell is running interactively  If the shell happens to be running interactively  then it moves on to sourcing the    bashrc file  However  in a shell invoked by cron  the  - variable doesn t contain the i value which indicates interactivity  Therefore  the    bashrc file never gets sourced fully  As a result  the environment variables never got set  If this happens to be your issue  feel free to comment out the block of code as follows and try again     case  - in        i               return     esac   I hope this turns out useful

User · Answer

For me I had to specify path in my NodeJS file     did not work      require  dotenv   config    instead    DID WORK   require  dotenv   config   path    full custom path to your  env

User · Answer

You can define environment variables in the crontab itself when running crontab -e from the command line   LANG nb NO UTF-8 LC ALL nb NO UTF-8   m h  dom mon dow   command            sleep 5s  amp  amp  echo  yo    This feature is only available to certain implementations of cron   Ubuntu and Debian currently use vixie-cron which allows these to be declared in the crontab file  also GNU mcron      Archlinux and RedHat use cronie which does not allow environment variables to be declared and will throw syntax errors in the cron log   Workaround can be done per-entry     m h  dom mon dow   command           export LC ALL nb NO UTF-8  sleep 5s  amp  amp  echo  yo

User · Answer

I got one more solution for this problem    0 5          HOME  profile   path to command to run   In this case it will pick all the environment variable defined in your  HOME  profile file   Of course  HOME is also not set  you have to replace it with the full path of your  HOME

[linux] Where can I set environment variables that crontab will use?

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