/notes

Technical Notes

1. The environment variables in a user's ~/.bash_profile file are not available to crontab jobs

Some crontab jobs may fail to work because a binary is in a non-standard path location. The PATH environment variable is usually updated with these file paths in ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc.

There are many different workarounds:

  • Set the environment variable at the top of the crontab file:
ENVIRONMENT_VAR=production

* * * * * /path/to/command/to/runn
  • Chain the loading of the .bash_profile with the cron job command:
0 5 * * * . $HOME/.profile; /path/to/command/to/runn
  • Set the SHELL to /bin/bash at the top of the crontab file and then source the .bash_profile
SHELL=/bin/bash

* * * * * source ~/.bash_profile && /path/to/command/to/run

More solutions are discussed in the StackOverlow question below:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2229825/where-can-i-set-environment-variables-that-crontab-will-use