pm2 doesnt work with crontab

plainbroke

@sdetweil
pi is my user. I know not very original or safe but it is on a closed network.
that is why I tried the pi user in the crontab.
and it shows up when I do crontab -l.
So I think it is setup under pi correctly.
Do I need to do it as root sudo crontab -e and use pi or root as the user?

sdetweil

@plainbroke no. what fo the pm2 logs show?

pm2 logs --lines=xxx
xxx is number of most recent lines, default 15

karsten13

@plainbroke

you can do cron restart with pm2 too, see https://pm2.keymetrics.io/docs/usage/restart-strategies/

plainbroke

This post is deleted!

sdetweil

@plainbroke i mean after cron trying to start
pm2

set a cron entry for an hour from now stop MagicMirror and flush the logs

pm2 stop all
pm2 flush

see what the logs say then

sdetweil

@karsten13 yes, but he wants stop and start

plainbroke

@sdetweil
Got ya, I miss understood before.
Running and waiting for results now…

Finally got results useing the proper path.
@sdetweil
You can mark this resolved.

sdetweil

@plainbroke how long til it might trigger?

plainbroke

@sdetweil
From that post about an hour. and it was supposed to trigger this morning around 6:30 am.
It did not and it did not leave anything in the logs since last night when I pm2 stop all then pm2 flush. around 8:30 pm .
So that means cron job did nothing with pm2 over night
I have been experimenting so there are a couple different job lines.
I really expected something in the log. But this is all I get.

pi@MM:~ $ pm2 logs --lines=100
[TAILING] Tailing last 100 lines for [all] processes (change the value with --lines option)
/home/pi/.pm2/pm2.log last 100 lines:
/home/pi/.pm2/logs/mm-out.log last 100 lines:
/home/pi/.pm2/logs/mm-error.log last 100 lines:

My Crontab on 2 different MM setups. I get the same nothing on both.
Both are running Bookworm and MM 2.3.1

05 20 * * * pi /usr/local/bin/pm2 start mm
15 07 * * * pi pm2 start mm
30 21 * * * pi pm2 stop mm
05 20 * * * root /usr/local/bin/pm2 start mm
15 07 * * * root pm2 start mm
30 21 * * * root pm2 stop mm

chrisfr1976

@plainbroke

Hi,

try this:

crontab -e with connected user:

05 20 * * * /usr/bin/pm2 start mm
15 07 * * * /usr/bin/pm2 start mm
30 21 * * * /usr/bin/pm2 stop mm

sudo crontab -e is not necessary.
I do not understand the start at 20:05 (first line)
my pm2 is in /usr/bin
always use full path in crontab

If you’re not sure where PM2 is you can use find / -iname pm2 in the console. Important is the full path in crontab.
/home/chris/.nvm/versions/node/v22.9.0/lib/node_modules/pm2/pm2 would be an alternative for me.