Setting path for whenever in cron so it can find ruby - ruby

Question

My ruby is in /usr/local/bin. whenever can't find it, and setting PATH at the top of my cron file doesn't work either, I think because whenever is running the command inside of a new bash instance.
# this does not work
PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin
# Begin Whenever generated tasks for: foo
0 * * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /srv/foo/releases/20110429110637 && script/rails runner -e production '\''ActiveRecord::SessionStore::Session.destroy_recent(15)'\'''
# End Whenever generated tasks for: foo
How can I tell whenever where my ruby binary is? Making a symbolic link from /usr/bin seems messy to me, but I guess that might be the only option.
This question offers env :PATH, "..." in schedule.rb as a solution, but (a) I can't find any documentation of that feature anywhere in the docs (b) it doesn't seem to have solved the asker's problem (unfortunately it takes non-trivial turnaround time for me to just try it).
update actually it is in the bottom of this page, i'll try it now.
more info
I can't modify the cron command because it's generated by whenever
i verified that if I make a new bash shell with bash -l, /usr/bin/env finds ruby just fine
I just tried the exact command in cron, starting with /bin/bash, from the command line of that user, and it worked.
so, this is very mysterious...

Answer 1

The solution is to put this in schedule.rb:
env :PATH, ENV['PATH']
Here's a little guide I put together on the topic.

Answer 2

rewrite your crontab as
0 * * * * { PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin ; export PATH ;/bin/bash -l -c 'cd /srv/foo/releases/20110429110637 && script/rails runner -e production '\''ActiveRecord::SessionStore::Session.destroy_recent(15)'\''' ; }
Or you should try to figure out why your BASH shell is not picking the PATH=... that is almost certainly in your .profile or .bash_profile.
I hope this helps.

Answer 3

As John Bachir pointed out, you can do it via env. But let me add more input. I am deploying on AWS Opsworks. Unfortunately they do not have a ruby manager (RVM, Rbenv, etc) installed by default.
The first thing I needed to do was SSH into the instance and figure out which ruby I was using. This was easy enough by executing the which ruby command in a terminal.
$ which ruby
/usr/local/bin/ruby
Cron was using ruby located at /usr/bin/ruby. This needed to be changed.
In schedule.rb, I have:
set :env_path, ''
env :PATH, #env_path if #env_path.present?
In local, env_path doesn't need to be set. For most users, the only thing to do is execute whenever as such:
bundle exec whenever --set 'environment=development' --update-crontab
On a staging / production environment, ruby may be installed elsewhere. So running this may be more appropriate:
bundle exec whenever --set 'environment=staging&env_path=/usr/bin/local' --update-crontab
You will need to replace /usr/bin/local with the output of echo $PATH.
In Opsworks, however, I needed to create a custom Chef recipe that looked like:
node[:deploy].each do |application, deploy|
execute 'whenever' do
user 'deploy'
group 'nginx'
cwd "#{deploy[:deploy_to]}/current"
command "bundle exec whenever --set 'environment=#{deploy[:environment_variables][:RAILS_ENV]}&env_path=#{ENV['PATH']}' --update-crontab"
end
end
I hope the information here is clear enough.