Finally got it working. Here is the steps done in my computer (running OSX), it might change a little bit if you use Linux.

I’ve created a script with the following code:

#!/bin/bash
cd /path/project
mix phx.server&

And run with the following line on crontab:

*/1 * * * * /tmp/test.sh >> /var/log/crontab.log 2>&1

The output of crontab.log was showing this:

/tmp/test.sh: line 2: mix: command not found

Using the full path of mix didn’t solve it. (/usr/local/bin/mix phx.server)

env: elixir: No such file or directory

Searching that on google, I found an comment from José Valim, https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/issues/789#issuecomment-12657214

But even using /usr/local/bin/elixir /usr/local/bin/mix phx.server & didn’t solve it, because it gave the following error:

/usr/local/bin/elixir: line 123: exec: erl: not found

So, if you output the $PATH, you will see that only have 2 directories (or less than you expected): /usr/bin:/bin

You can check where is your binaries, with the command which, like which elixir. You will need in your path at least for mix, elixir and erl.

In the final script, you should export PATH concatenating the missing path, in my case was /usr/local/bin/.

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin/

After that you should be able to run any command with mix, you don’t need the full path.

It works perfect, thanks for your help,
Really wonderful community.

You can put that code cd path/to/myapp; /usr/local/bin/mix hello.greeting inside a shell script (something.sh) give +x permission (chmod +x something.sh) and then call it on the crontab. Don’t forget to use full path instead of relative paths.

Does cron send you any logs? If not please activate the feature to send you the logs of each run to your local address for the debugging period at least(*).

Also, how are you editing your crontab? If you do not use crontab -e(*) Cron won’t know about the changes and nothing will be run of course.

Have you made sure that the project folder and all folders above and below and the files are actually readable/accessible by the user that owns the crontab in question?

(*): Can’t look up details or exact command as I’m on mobile right now.

As far as I remember Cron log will only contain that a job has started, it will not contain it’s results. Please try writing into a file, use the wrapper script from before and change it to be like this:

cd /path/to/project
mix hello.greeting >> /tmp/greeting.log