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Advice for those with cron job woes (endless preparing)

Sharing this for others. I was having woes getting sendy to actually send a campaign even though the little blue box disappeared, the cron job was active! but that doesn't mean it is actually working

Here was my issue.

The cron line advice they give in the popup dialog box is a bit vague (misleading)
*/5 * * * * php "and more stuff here"

It's this part php that was the issue.
It assumes that an alias in the path will launch the installed copy of php and this might not be true on your system.

So this advice is for those who have super user shell access only (if you are hosted on a service, ask their tech support)

First Make sure you have the php cli loaded (version 5 in my case) sudo apt-get install php5-cli

then find out where it is
:/$ whereis php5

then edit your crontab
sudo crontab -e

copy and paste the entire example cron job from the popup dialog.
*/5 * * * * php "your full sendy install path"/scheduled.php > /dev/null 2>&

change php to the first path listed from whereis php5 in my case /usr/bin/php5

That did it....no more endless preparing.

Comments

  • BenBen
    edited August 2014

    Thanks for sharing.

    Note to other users:

    You can only do that if you have root access to your server and your server is probably a VPS or cloud server.

    If your campaign is stuck in 'Preparing' mode and you don't know what this article is talking about, send your cron job command to your hosting support to check if it's correct.

    Also see this FAQ to learn more → http://sendy.co/troubleshooting#campaign-stuck-in-preparing-mode

This discussion has been closed.