javan-whenever not writing crontab with Capistrano deploy

Question

I’ve been trying to get whenever running on an ec2 instance that was created with ec2 on rails.

When I deploy with Capistrano it indicates that the crontab was written, but when I log into the server and run crontab -l it does not seem to have been changed.

If I go into the release folder and manually run whenever --write-crontab then run crontab -l - it gets updated properly.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

Capistrano is not indicating any errors so not sure how to debug, have tried a billion permutations and combinations and nothing changes.

Answer 1

namespace :deploy do
  desc "write the crontab file"
  task :write_crontab, :roles => [:db_admin] do  
    run "cd #{release_path} && sudo -u root  whenever --write-crontab #{application}"
  end  
end

Or there is also apparently a -user option in whenever that can help with this.

Answer 2

you should be able to just require the whenever capistrano command in your cap deploy file like so:

require 'whenever/capistrano'

if you're using bundler, you'll need to add this as well:

set :whenever_command, 'bundle exec whenever'

Answer 3

This is not related to OP, but according to this issue, Capistrano 2.11.1 needs Whenever 0.7.3 in order to fix the issue.