Starting MM Crontab

mumblebaj

Hi.

I have been using crontab to start my MM for ages and it has always worked well. After updating it no longer seems to work. cron calls a script that has the following.

cd ~/MagicMirror
DISPLAY=0 npm start

Now, I have seen that it is suggest to use node --run start:X11 going forward and I have updated my start script with same but that does not seem to work either.

So my mm.sh now looks like,

cd ~/MagicMirror
DISPLAY=0 node --run start:X11

But as mentioned, this does not work.

Any ideas?

KristjanESPERANTO

@mumblebaj said in Starting MM Crontab:

DISPLAY=0 node --run start:X11

It should be start:x11 and not start:X11.

Are you still using X11?

Does it run when you start it manually?

Can you provide the logs from the startup?

mumblebaj

@KristjanESPERANTO Sorry, typo, it is lower x. It start when I manually run npm start. When I manually run node --run start:x11 it works fine. When I manually run the script ./mm.sh it works fine. When calling it from the cron nothing. In my log I see the command node --run start:x11 but MM does not launch.

sdetweil

@mumblebaj is the cron jon in the user crontab (contrab -e) ? or root (sudo crontab -e) ?

if root, the pm2 job doesn’t exist there, it opnly exists under user who created the pm2 job

mumblebaj

@sdetweil in my user, crontab -e. It worked just fine until I updated my mirror this morning. I don’t use pm2 on my installation for my own reasons… 😉

sdetweil

@mumblebaj said in Starting MM Crontab:

It worked just fine until I updated my mirror this morning.

only MM update?

note that we changed the startup strings.

“start”: “node --run start:x11”,

mumblebaj

@sdetweil Yep, only MM update. Let me try start: node --run start:x11 and see what happens.

KristjanESPERANTO

@mumblebaj Just an idea: Maybe the node version used in Cron could be to old. When you run a script manually in your terminal, your full user environment (including things like .bashrc or .zshrc) is loaded. Cron runs in a much more minimal environment — it often doesn’t load your shell config files, so tools like nvm (Node Version Manager) might not be available.

How to fix it:

Use the full path to Node: Find it with which node and use that path in your cron job.
Set the environment manually in cron: You can define your PATH at the top of the cron file.
Source nvm in your script: If you use nvm, add source ~/.nvm/nvm.sh and nvm use <version> before calling node.

mumblebaj

@KristjanESPERANTO Thanks Kristjan. But I don’t see how updating MM could cause this. I only updated MM with Sam’s upgrade script. Don’t see how that has changed anything with regards to how Crontab works. Maybe it is related to changing the launch to node --run start. I can see the command being fired in the log but it does not launch MM like it did before the upgrade.

Anyhow, I manually launch it for now till I find a suitable solution.

sdetweil

@mumblebaj did you use npm start before?

it ‘may’ be the path as @KristjanESPERANTO mentioned

so from the user command line do

which node

and use that result in the cron command