How can I run a django management command by cron job

Question

I am working with a django app called django-mailbox. The purpose of this is to import email messages via pop3 and other protocols and store them in a db. I want to do this

Answer 1

on the server machine:

$ sudo crontab -l
no crontab for root
$ sudo crontab -e
no crontab for root - using an empty one

Select an editor.  To change later, run 'select-editor'.
  1. /bin/ed
  2. /bin/nano        <---- easiest
  3. /usr/bin/vim.basic
  4. /usr/bin/vim.tiny

Choose 1-4 [2]:    

choose your preferred editor

then see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron for how to schedule when will the command run, direct it to some .sh file on your machine, make sure you give full path as this is going to run in root user context.

the script the cron will run may look something like:

#!/bin/bash
cd /absolute/path/to/django/project
/usr/bin/python ./manage.py getmail

Answer 2

If you are using a virtual env use the python binary from the virtualenv

* * * * * /path/to/virtualenv/bin/python /path/to/project/manage.py management_command