Cronjob Raspberry Pi not working

Question

I am trying to use my raspi to host a discord bot that every morning publishes the food in my school. I have setup a bronjob with crontab -e but it's not working.

Crontab lookis like this:

45 07 * 2-5 python3 /home/pi/Desktop/Python/dcfoodbot/new/send.py

30 10 * 1 python3 /home/pi/Desktop/Python/dcfoodbot/new/send.py

with blank line at the end. (Published later on mondays because food is updated that day and can sometimes be late). When i tried making it post every minuite for debuging it worked but setting it to a specific time, for example 26 18 * 2-5 python3.... did not work. I would really appreciate help!

Thanks!

EDIT:

Changed:

45 07 * 2-5 python3 /home/pi/Desktop/Python/dcfoodbot/new/send.py

30 10 * 1 python3 /home/pi/Desktop/Python/dcfoodbot/new/send.py

to

45 07 * * 2-5 python3 /home/pi/Desktop/Python/dcfoodbot/new/send.py

30 10 * * 1 python3 /home/pi/Desktop/Python/dcfoodbot/new/send.py

Answer 1

Your schedules: 45 07 * 2-5 & 30 10 * 1 are incomplete/erroneous. You could use some help from my friend "The crontab guru"; it gives you an English-language definition of a schedule that you input, and allows you to verify your schedule expression. Note that there are 5 fields, but you seem to have supplied only 4.

AFAIK, cron does verify schedule expressions for validity, and consequently it "fails silently" rather than throwing an error. Perhaps this verification is a difficult thing to do?

Nevertheless, it's always good practice to throw errors. Since cron is not attached to a user terminal, you typically won't see errors thrown by your cron jobs at the console. However, you may use a redirect in your crontab entry to capture those error (stderr) messages generated by your script. For example:

# FROM: 
python3 /home/pi/Desktop/Python/dcfoodbot/new/send.py

TO:
python3 /home/pi/Desktop/Python/dcfoodbot/new/send.py 2>> /home/pi/Desktop/myfailures.txt

Answer 2

Try defining the path of your Python environment first, and after that add the path to your Python script. This is (like) one of my settings:

30 23 * * * /home/pi/myprojectfolder/venv/bin/python /home/pi/myprojectfolder/scraper.py

Since my project runs in a virtual environment (the folder called venv, where I have lots of different packages installed), I let the system know I want to use that Python interpreter. After that, I tell the system what script to run.

If you don't have a virtual environment, try using your system's default Python path. Find out what that is by typing which python in your shell. You will get something like usr/bin/python and that will be your path.

So, in crontab you will have a single line with 3 commands, all separated by white space:

1. when to run? (run every day at 23.30)
2. where is Python?
3. where is the script I want to run?

To see how to properly generate cron commands, see the website crontab.guru.

I hope it helps.