What is my Cronjobs problem?

Question

Hello there,

I have no idea whats going on. But I have a script that looks like this. Cron job refuses to run it:

include_once 'class_lib/mime_mail/mimeDecode.php';
include_once 'class_lib/Mail/IMAPv2.php';
include_once 'inc-functions.php';
include_once "$_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]/class_lib/DbFuctioneer.php";

$dbFuctioneer = new DbFuctioneer();

Everything works well when I remove:

$dbFuctioneer = new DbFuctioneer();

Even when DbFuctioneer() looks like this:

<?php

class DbFuctioneer { 
    function dbCountMatches( $count) {
        return $count;
    }
}

Does Cron have a problem with Classes in his Jobs?

Thank you for your time.

Kind regards,
Marius

Answer 1

Do the following (run your script from the command line) and check the output is correct:

print("$_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]/class_lib/DbFuctioneer.php");

Most likely its broken.

Answer 2

It seems

$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']

is empty when cron is running its job.

Why is that?

Answer 3

There is no $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] present when you call the script from the command line.

That variable (along with many others like REQUEST_URI, SCRIPT_NAME, HTTP_HOST....) is set by Apache, which is not running in your case.

You need to set the root directory manually.

To find out whether you are running in the context of a web site or from the command line, use php_sapi_name().

You could set $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] manually when running on the command line, but I would rather use a completely new constant or variable to put the path into.