Cron jobs on Dreamhost

There is how I do it on shared hostings where I am not allowed to automate cron tasks on the server.

I use a website: www.webcron.org where you can setup cron tasks. This websites seems to be only in french, but there should be some similar websites in english...
If you use this one, be careful not giving your main email adress, they'll use it to spam you...

I just fixed this issue on my site. I decided to use the cron-lynx script that is provided within Drupal.

I created a cron entry like this:
45 * * * * /home/odb/organizersdb.org/scripts/cron-lynx.sh

I went ahead and tried running it from the command line by typing:

/home/odb/organizersdb.org/scripts/cron-lynx.sh

and I got a permission denied error. Turns out that to get it to run, I had to change the permissions:

chmod 755 cron-lynx.sh

which makes it executable. Then I could run it but still, the run did not show up in the logs of my Drupal site.

Then I opened cron-lynx.sh in a text editor and noticed that it says:
/usr/bin/lynx -source http://yoursite.com/cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1

Well obviously this needs to be customized to have our site in it:
/usr/bin/lynx -source http://organizersdb.org/cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1

THAT did the trick, now the cron run shows up in the Drupal logs when
I run it from the command line.

-rich

I tried the wget method explained above, but for some reason it wasn't working for me. So I contacted DreamHost support and they suggested using php instead of wget in my crontab file.

So, I *was* using (this did not work):
0 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -0 - -q http://my_domain.com/cron.php

But then switching my crontab to the following worked fine:
0 * * * * /dh/cgi-system/php.cgi /home/my_dreamhost_user/my_domain.com/cron.php

It depends on what version of PHP your domain is running; the above example is for PHP 4. For PHP 5, you would change "php.cgi" to "php5.cgi". If you don't know your PHP version, check the DreamHost Control Panel (domains > manage domains > edit) or your Drupal admin screens (/admin/logs/status/).

(There's an alternative method that requires you to edit the contents of cron.php itself, but I decided to steer clear of that one.)

More info here: http://dhurl.com/?al9HvqwB

I hope that helps anyone else who gets stuck like I did.

droopy75

Adding cron jobs on Dreamhost is now very easy via their web panel.

In the Goodies -> Cron Jobs section add a new cron job and simply enter the following for the command:

Saving this modifies the user's crontab. If you ssh into your account and run

there will be an entry something like this

Works for me!