This question is intended to be an informational post for others to find because luckily I've already found the solution.
I tried running the Wordpress-CLI command as a cron job in crontab on the Cloudways server. The command runs without any issues directly in the terminal, but fails with a fatal PHP error when launched using crontab.
The basic commands of Wordpress-CLI are as follows:
wp migeratedb configuration file [id]
Since the context in which crontab is run is usually unknown, and the $PATH variable may not be available, I modified the command to provide the necessary absolute path:
/usr/local/bin/wp migeratedb configuration file [id] --path=/absolute/path/to/wordpress/core/files
Similarly, this modified command also runs perfectly without any issues when launched from the terminal.
The final crontab entry will look like this:
0 5 * * * /usr/local/bin/wp migeratedb configuration file [id] --path=/absolute/path/to/wordpress/core/files
When run from the scheduler it produces the following error:
PHP Fatal error: require(): Failed opening required 'wp-salt.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/php') in phar:///usr/local/bin/wp/vendor/wp-cli/config-command/src/Config_Command.php(444) : eval()'d code on line 34
After some experimentation, I realized that this error occurs for all WP-CLI commands except the very basic
wp --info
, producing the following output:
OS: Linux 4.19.0-21-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.249-2 (2022-06-30) x86_64 Shell: /bin/sh PHP binary: /usr/bin/php7.4 PHP version: 7.4.33 php.ini used: /etc/php/7.4/cli/php.ini MySQL binary: /usr/bin/mysql MySQL version: mysql Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.4.20-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 5.2 SQL modes: WP-CLI root dir: phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor/wp-cli/wp-cli WP-CLI vendor dir: phar://wp-cli.phar/vendor WP_CLI phar path: [absolute/path/to/user/home/directory] WP-CLI packages dir: WP-CLI cache dir: [absolute/path/to/user/home/directory]/.wp-cli/cache WP-CLI global config: WP-CLI project config: WP-CLI version: 2.7.1
I also tried the following adaptations without success:
Download the new wp-cli.phar and use it with the command.
View and change all permissions of used folders
Try running the cronjob as another user
Use /usr/bin/php Change the command to run wp-cli.phar
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I finally figured out that this error was related to the way the hosting provider (in this case Cloudways) set up the WordPress configuration in the
wp-config.phpfile.The salt and secret authorization keys are stored in a separate file,
wp-salt.phpreferenced in the error message. It can be referenced directly in the configuration file via:require('wp-salt.php'). Since this is not part of WordPress core and crontab is running in a different environment, it cannot determine the correct directory where the file is located andrequire()fails with a fatal error.To fix this, change the line in
wp-config.phptorequire(__DIR__.'/wp-salt.php');so that the file always Referenced from the same directory as the configuration file.Another option is to remove the line entirely and replace it with the contents of the
wp-salt.phpfile, just like Wordpress core does.