Running cron jobs on aws elastic beanstalk - django

Question

I\'m having trouble getting my cron jobs to execute.

Setup:

Django - 1.9

Elastic beanstalk - 64bit Amazon Linux 2016.03 v2.1.3 running Python 3.4

Answer 1

2018 Update using Django 2.0.6 + AWS ElasticBeanstalk + Cronjob

I found I needed to export the AWS environment variables using source /opt/python/current/env to prevent manage.py from throwing the error "The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty".

This is because I had placed my Django Secret key in the os.environ for beanstalk which it seems is not accessible by shell/cron by default.

See https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=108465

My final cron job .txt script was as follows. (process_emails is my own django management function, myjob.log is where the output of the function call is logged).

*/15 * * * * source /opt/python/run/venv/bin/activate && cd /opt/python/current/app/ && source /opt/python/current/env && python manage.py process_emails >> /var/log/myjob.log 2>&1

Answer 2

This works for me in Django 1.10.6 + AWS ElasticBeanstalk + Cronjob

* * * * * source /opt/python/run/venv/bin/activate && cd /opt/python/current/app/ && python manage.py do_your_thing > $HOME/cron-sqs.log 2>&1

do_your_thing is a management command