Django management command not found by cron

Question

I made a management app imaginitively called update. The following work fine from the command line:

./manage.py update
/full/path/manage.py update

But when I have the following cron command:

00 */3 * * * /websites/bnc/manage.py update >/dev/null

It emails me this error:

Unknown command: 'update'

Type 'manage.py help' for usage.

It smells like a path issue but I can't see how because I can call it manually from wherever. Any idea what's going on here?

Answer 1

The environment is likely not the same, so PYTHONPATH/PATH are not set. It might fail to find import django (or python/lib/site-packages).

Answer 2

I'm doing something similar. Try prefacing /websites/bnc/manage.py in your crontab with a PYTHONPATH=...