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phated merged 2 commits into from
Nov 3, 2017
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docs(recipe): Running gulp via cron task #2034

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Creates recipe for running gulp via cron task
romellem Oct 31, 2017
c922b37
Links cron file within main recipes README
romellem Oct 31, 2017
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1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions docs/recipes/README.md
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* [Run Grunt Tasks from Gulp](run-grunt-tasks-from-gulp.md)
* [Exports as tasks](exports-as-tasks.md)
* [Rollup with rollup-stream](rollup-with-rollup-stream.md)
* [Run gulp task via cron job](cron-task.md)
25 changes: 25 additions & 0 deletions docs/recipes/cron-task.md
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# Run gulp task via cron job

While logged in via a user that has privileges to run `gulp`, run the following:

crontab -e

to edit your current "[crontab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron)" file.

Typically, within a cron job, you want to run any binary using absolute paths,
so an initial approach to running `gulp build` every minute might look like:

* * * * * cd /your/dir/to/run/in && /usr/local/bin/gulp build
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@phated phated Oct 31, 2017

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Why the * * * * *?

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@romellem romellem Nov 1, 2017

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Oh that is a cron thing. Before the actual command you want to run, you have to specify the schedule for the command. That is, how often a command should run:

# ┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)
# │ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)
# │ │ ┌───────────── day of month (1 - 31)
# │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12)
# │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday;
# │ │ │ │ │                                       7 is also Sunday on some systems)
# │ │ │ │ │
# │ │ │ │ │
# * * * * *  command to execute

Per What does * * * * * (five asterisks) in a cron file mean?,

Every minute of every day of every week of every month, that command runs.

I figured I would use that rather some some arbitrary "run once a day at midnight" or something.

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@phated phated Nov 3, 2017

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Sounds good. Thanks


However, you might see in the cron logs that you get this error:

> `/usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory`

To fix this, we need to add a [symbolic link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ln_\(Unix\))
within `/usr/bin` to point to the actual path of our node binary.

Be sure you are logged in as a **sudo** user, and paste in the following command to your terminal:

sudo ln -s $(which node) /usr/bin/node

Once this link is established, your cron task should run successfully.