Run cronjobs with dokku PaaS

I have a crawler running for watiseropderadio.nl and I got some problems with setting up the crontabs for it. I have a node application with a simple node webserver and some other scripts which are runnable via npm run .... I deployed the app to a dokku server and it was running.

Next I wanted to test the run-command of dukku:

ssh -t dokku@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -- run crawler npm run npm_script_name --rm

It was running fine.

Note: Use --rm here to not overload your server with not closed docker instances.

Then I wanted to create a crontab for the crawler, my crontab looked like this:

# dokku user
* * * * * /usr/local/bin/dokku --rm run crawler npm run npm_script_name

but I got errors all the time complaining about a plugn command not found:

/var/lib/dokku/plugins/enabled/00_dokku-standard/commands: line 137: plugn: command not found

then I found this GitHub-issue and changed my crontab to this and everything worked:

# dokku user
* * * * * bash -c ': | PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/bin" dokku --rm run crawler npm run npm_script_name'

So hopefully someone will not be fighting for a long time with this problem by reading this blog post. Enjoy ;-)

Keywords: docker, node, cron

Happy coding! – Found a mistake or a typo? Please submit a PR to my GitHub-repo.