Ruby rails, rake, crontab and coding

Question

I have a rake rake task that works fine. I want this task to be performed periodically by crontab, so I added it to crontab as follows:

0,30,0 * * * * cd /var/www/html/metajorn && RAILS_ENV=production /usr/local/bin/rake myraketask --trace   >> /var/www/html/metajorn/log/cron_log.log 2>&1

In cron_log.log, I see the following error:

rake aborted!
invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:98:in `parse_gem_version'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:80:in `gem_version'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:59:in `load_rails_gem'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:54:in `load_initializer'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:38:in `run'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:11:in `boot!'
/var/www/html/metajorn/config/boot.rb:110:in `<top (required)>'
/var/www/html/metajorn/Rakefile:4:in `require'
/var/www/html/metajorn/Rakefile:4:in `<top (required)>'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2383:in `load'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2383:in        `raw_load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2017:in `block in load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2068:in `standard_exception_handling'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2016:in `load_rakefile'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2000:in `block in run'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:2068:in `standard_exception_handling'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake.rb:1998:in `run'
/usr/local/bin/rake:31:in `<main>'

It should be noted that the task works fine if I run it manually.

Thank,

M

Answer 1

Thanks Carl Smotricz for the tip!

I finally solved the problem: cron uses environment variables that may differ from user environment variables ... this was for me, my crond service uses us-ascii encoding, while my rake command uses utf-8.

, crond, crond ( centos5 :/var/spool/cron/root)

SHELL=/bin/bash
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"

crond: .

.

Answer 2

:) http://www.logikdev.com/2010/02/02/locale-settings-for-your-cron-job/

Answer 3

, , , , cron ; - USER SHELL, . , , - set, ! PATH , cron, .

Most often, the differences between manual start and cron-run are due to differences in the environment as described.

Answer 4

Yes, for some reason, when cron launches rake, it runs into problems with Ruby 1.9 character encoding when loading RAILS_GEM_VERSION from environment.rb

#boot.rb
  def gem_version
    if defined? RAILS_GEM_VERSION
      RAILS_GEM_VERSION
    elsif ENV.include?('RAILS_GEM_VERSION')
      ENV['RAILS_GEM_VERSION']
    else
      parse_gem_version(read_environment_rb)
    end
  end

how about getting around this by specifying RAILS_GEM_VERSION in the cron rake command?

RAILS_ENV=production RAILS_GEM_VERSION=2.3.5 /usr/local/bin/rake myraketask