Crontab errors

You should probably post the exact cron entry you are trying to run.

I'm not familiar with digital ocean's documentation (link?), but here's what the loomio docs suggest:

# Minutes Hours Day Month Year Command
# 5 minutes past each hour send proposal closing soon notifications for proposals closing in 24 hours
5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/dokku run loomio rake loomio:send_missed_yesterday_email

# Each 15 minutes check for proposals that have expired and close them
*/15 * * * * /usr/local/bin/dokku run loomio rake loomio:close_lapsed_motions

# 1 minute past each hour, send the missed yesterday email to users in a timezone where it is 6am
1 * * * * /usr/local/bin/dokku run loomio rake loomio:send_proposal_closing_soon

These jobs don't seem to cause a problem like what you describe.

In general, the command you run inside the docker container shouldn't want stdin, or a tty, and ideally you'd make that so. Failing that, there's the '-t' flag to docker. I'm not sure if dokku gives you access to it, but you could base your cron job on docker exec -t instead of dokku run.

If your job actually wants something from stdin though it's still going to be in trouble. Maybe try running it from a terminal to see what's happening there.

Thanks @mc0e - I set the crontab entries exactly as above. But also included the option to log the output so I could see what was going on.

I tried the "-t" flag but it is not available.

I will try running "docker exec" shortly and see how that goes. Thanks for your input.

I'd run the commands from the command line first to see why it's looking for input. Maybe it's asking for a password or some such thing?

Running the commands from command line is throwing no errors at all. So could it be permissions that crontab is using? Sorry not strong in linux or rails

The user running those cron commands needs to be able to run docker commands. It's expected to be root, but basically what's needed is to be able to write to Docker's socket, which is group writable by the docker group our some such thing (currently writing on my phone, so haven't checked the detail)

(belatedly)

Those cron commands run in the host environment, but everything after /usr/local/bin/dokku run loomio is a command that gets passed into the docker container.

I'm not clear where you were adding your logging, but without seeing your exact cron command (and knowing a bit of rails stuff) it's not clear how the logging is taking place. Is it happening within the container, or in the host? If in the container, is it logging to stdout or stderr, or is it trying to use syslog, writing direct to some file, or writing to a tty that it presumes to be present?

If this is still an issue, post your exact cron entry.

I'm not entirely sure whether I just missed it before, or if something changed, but as of now I have a mail spool full of messages along the lines of what adam reported.

If dokku has jobs which are intended to run as cron jobs, and they expect to have an attached tty, then I'd say that is a bug which should be fixed.