[mythtvnz] cron.daily mythfilldatabase environment issue

[Nick Rout]

On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 10:08 AM, Paulgir <paulgir at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 11 Sep 2015 01:13:48 +1200, Stephen Worthington <
> stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 10 Sep 2015 20:47:58 +1200, you wrote:
>>
>> I have been trying to setup a daily cron job to udpate my listings
>>> from http://epg.org.nz/freeview.xml.gz
>>>
>>> My script runs fine if I run in manually but it fails when run from
>>> cron with these errors:
>>>
>>> 2015-09-10 07:55:52.485142 W  This application expects to be running a
>>> locale that specifies a UTF-8 codeset, and many features may behave
>>> improperly with your current language settings. Please set the LC_ALL
>>> or LC_CTYPE, and LANG variable(s) in the environment in which this
>>> program is executed to include a UTF-8 codeset (such as
>>> 'en_US.UTF-8').
>>> 2015-09-10 07:55:52.485154 W  Cannot locate your home directory.
>>> Please set the environment variable HOME
>>> 2015-09-10 07:55:52.485158 E  Failed to init MythContext, exiting.
>>>
>>> Here is my script:
>>> #! /bin/bash
>>> echo "$(date) : starting epg import " >> /tmp/epggrubber.log
>>> PATH=/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
>>> HOME=/home/mythtv
>>> LANGUAGE=en_NZ:en
>>> LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8
>>> wget -O /tmp/freeview.xml.gz http://epg.org.nz/freeview.xml.gz >>
>>> /tmp/epggrubber.log 2>&1
>>> gunzip /tmp/freeview.xml.gz >> /tmp/epggrubber.log 2>&1
>>> mythfilldatabase --update --file --sourceid 2 --xmlfile
>>> /tmp/freeview.xml --update >> /tmp/epggrubber.log 2>&1
>>> rm /tmp/freeview.xml
>>> echo "$(date) : finished epg import " >> /tmp/epggrubber.log
>>> exit
>>>
>>> As you can see I am setting the environment variables for home and
>>> language.
>>>
>>> Anyone know what I need to do to make it work?
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Daniel Hughes
>>>
>>
>> Doing this properly is a tricky problem that took me days to get
>> working to my satisfaction.  So I will set out what I did and why.
>>
>> mythfilldatabase needs to be run by a mythtv group user.  If you want
>> to run it from a cron job, then you need to run it from a user cron
>> job, not a system one.  The easiest user to do this from is normally
>> the one you use for mythfrontend.  The mythtv user is often not fully
>> set up properly, and its crontab may not work.  Any cron job needs to
>> have it full environment set up as part of the script that is being
>> run, as it will not inherit any environment from cron.
>>
>> So, login as the mythfrontend user from ssh or a terminal window.  Put
>> your script in say /home/<mythfrontend user>/bin.  Make sure your
>> EDITOR variable points to your favourite command line editor (eg vi,
>> nano), then run the command "crontab -e" which will bring up the user
>> crontab for that user using $EDITOR.  Edit the crontab to add your
>> script, save the crontab file and exit.
>>
>> Note that manually trying to edit the user crontab file does not work
>> properly - you need to use the crontab command to do it.
>>
>> I use two scripts for doing my EPG.  By setting things up with the two
>> scripts, the first script can log all the output of the second script
>> to a log file, which makes it easy to see exactly what has gone wrong
>> when the EPG processing fails.  My first script (epg_temp) is run by
>> cron, and sets up the environment for the second script, and also
>> rotates its log file.  The second (epg_temp.sh) does my EPG processing
>> and runs mythfilldatabase.  The cron script (epg_temp) uses a helper
>> script logrotate.sh that has been added to sudoers so that it can
>> rotate the logs.
>>
>> I have put epg_temp and logrotate.sh on my web server so you can see
>> how they work:
>>
>>   http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/epg_temp
>>   http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/logrotate.sh
>>
>> The logrotate.sh file lives in my /home/stephen/bin directory, but is
>> chown root:root in order to be able to access the log files in
>> /var/log/mythtv.  You also need a logrotate.conf file in
>> /home/<mythfrontenduser>/.logrotate, which also needs to be chown
>> root:root:
>>
>>     http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/logrotate.conf
>>
>> There needs to be a file using the name of the mythfilldatabase user
>> in /etc/sudoers.d to allow logrotate.sh to work.  This is what I have
>> in my /etc/sudoers.d/stephen file:
>>
>> stephen ALL=NOPASSWD:/home/stephen/bin/logrotate.sh
>>
>> The sudoers file needs to be chown root:root and readonly for user and
>> group only, or it will not work.  It can not have any write
>> permissions at all.
>>
>> I have not posted my epg_temp.sh file, as it is too specific to how I
>> do EPG and not a good example to follow (it really needs to be
>> re-written).
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> mythtvnz mailing list
>> mythtvnz at lists.linuxnut.co.nz
>> http://lists.ourshack.com/mailman/listinfo/mythtvnz
>> Archives http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/mythtvnz/
>>
>
> I run the following:
>
> #! /bin/bash
> wget http://epg.org.nz/freeview.xml.gz
> gzip -d freeview.xml.gz
> mythfilldatabase --update --file --sourceid 1 --xmlfile freeview.xml
> rm freeview.xml
> exit
>
> It's been working for several years
>
> -Paul
>
>
Why when we have tv-grab_nz=py which works with mythbackend. No cron, so
environment problems.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ourshack.com/pipermail/mythtvnz/attachments/20150928/504402a7/attachment.html>