Cronjob

MadScientist

Depennding on the other modules you’re using it might be good to reload MM more than once a day. In my case once is enough. Without reloading the screen turns black after more than one day. Depending on your setup it could be better to reload it twice or 4 times a day. In the end the reload is very quick and you won’t notice anything.

CyruS1337

Perfect, did not know that I can reload the MagicMirror. Have always made a restart in the past. I’ll give feedback this evening on whether the cronjob works with the pm2 reload mm command

Zwirbel

@MadScientist : Is there a way to automatically reload MM once or twice a day? I have similar problems with the Netatmo module, which doesn’t pick up new data in the morning (as my WLAN is turned off during the night). A reload fixes this, but I would rather have this automatically (e.g. at 06:00 in the morning for example).

Maybe a simple script would help, but I don’t know where to put it.

CyruS1337

@MadScientist said in Cronjob:

55 19 * * * pm2 reload mm

The command works in the console pm2 reload mm

If I add it in the cron job, it will not do any reload.

Here is the excerpt from the crontab

# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
#
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
#
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').#
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
#
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h  dom mon dow   command
#
#MONTAG BIS SONNTAG UM 17:02 MAGICMIRROR RELOAD
02 17 * * * pm2 reload mm
#

MadScientist

This is my crontab:

# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
#
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 6 * * * pm2 reload mm

Are you running crontab -ewith sudo? Because you have to run it as the user that runs MM (= most likely without sudo).

Edit: @Zwirbel: For me it works using a cronjob. See what I wrote above and if you have questions regarding crontab, just ask again.

CyruS1337

Juhuiiiii, finally it worked. Many Thanks

I have always used the command sudo crontab -e and with this it did not work.

It works fine with the crontab -e command and then 0 6 * * * pm2 reload mm

Once again, thank you very much for your help!!!

MadScientist

Glad it worked! :smiling_face_with_open_mouth:

evroom

@CyruS1337 said in Cronjob:

I have always used the command sudo crontab -e and with this it did not work.

Just to clarify.

Normally you are user pi: $ who am I

So crontab -e will work for the pi user.
Using sudo crontab -e will change the crontab for the root user.

Now how can you tell what is what ?

For the user pi:
$ sudo crontab -l -u pi
which is the same as
$ crontab -l
For the user root:
$ sudo crontab -l -u root

Furthermore, when you have activated the root crontab, then the command will run as root, in the root (/) directory.
In this case pm2 reload command will search for the mm.sh script under / and will not find it.
Whereas when activated the pi crontab, the mm.sh script will be searched in the /home/pi directory, where it should be, and it will work.

Use pm2 show mmto show the details on mm under pm2.
Then you will understand it better.

Cron messages normally are directed to /var/log/cron.log, but on my system it is not directed:

$ grep cron /etc/rsyslog.conf
#cron.*				/var/log/cron.log

To see the cron messages, when not in cron.log:

$ tail -F /var/log/syslog | grep CRON

[ On my system I see CRON messages for root, although I do not have root crontab entries. There is a crond running that runs alongside $ systemctl status cron.]

Have fun :-)

CyruS1337

@evroom Many thanks for the detailed information.

As you can see, I always executed the command as sudo sudo crontab -e

So I always executed the commands in the root directory. Which thus never led to success.

Thanks again for the help and the detailed listing.

Greeting