I'm working on a project where I need to execute about a dozen different cron jobs that trigger commands in a PHP project. The PHP source depends on certain environment variables to distinguish dev/test/production environments and behave accordingly.

I just figured out that scripts executed from cron don't benefit from the export commands I've put into the .bashrc file. Apparently cron jobs don't source the .bashrc file.

I could add a another command to each line in my crontab, but that seems like a LOT of redundant code -- and also vulnerable to errors:
Is there some better way to inject environment variables into my php script? Either
1) export my environment variables in some other script (.bash_profile? .environment? other?) so that these vars are available to all crontab commands executed by one particular user
2) add the command source ~/.bashrc somewhere so that these environment variables will be in effect for all of my cron jobs
3) Inject this environment variable into PHP somehow before my php files execute?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

all 3) points sound like viable solutions to me.

but the code you show looks ok to me; does it not work?

The shell might be dash instead of bash, and .bashrc should normally only be used for interactive shells. But you can change it - something like this in the beginning of your crontab:

SHELL=/bin/bash
BASH_ENV=~/.bashrc

But I think it's probably better not to use .bashrc for this, and instead make some other script setting those variables.

1 members found this post helpful.

The code does seem to work, but is it really required to source the bashrc file on every single line? Is there no way to specify this value in a single spot?

Did you try to add SHELL and BASH_ENV in the beginning of your crontab?

Thanks for this suggestion. I've not yet tried this. I'm hoping to get more specifics about what those commands do. Is there any way to determine what shell is being used? Also, would assigning BASH_ENV displace any other configuration value or does it have an additive effect? This machine has a complex crontab and I want to avoid breaking other things.

I think the default shell for cron is /bin/sh - which usually is a symlink to dash. Setting the SHELL variable forces all commands in the crontab to use bash instead, and setting BASH_ENV tells bash to source ~/.bashrc which it normally does not.

If all you need to do is to set some variable, you can also add variables with values in the beginning of your crontab, for example:
That's probably a safer way, since you don't change other things.

1 members found this post helpful.

OK finding some answers to my own questions here...
OK I added a quick cron line to try and figure out what shell is running. Is this correct?
The result is:
What sort of behavior changes might I expect when switching *all* of my cron jobs from /bin/sh to /bin/bash?

I'm guessing that defining BASH_ENV would not have especially far-reaching consequences, especially because my .bashrc file is so simple.

I found some interesting detail here. There's a lot of posts/pages that talk about this sort of thing, but it's hard to get a handle on exactly what gets changed.

Ooooooh! This looks super helpful. I am in fact really just trying to set one environment variable so that my PHP scripts know whether the system is dev/test/production. Thank you for this. I'm going to try it out right now.

1 members found this post helpful.