python - crontab to run a script

Question

I'm fairly new to python and I'm trying to create a cronjob through a python script but I keep getting an error. Any help would be greatly appreciated it to show me what I'm doing wrong?

thanks

python script

from crontab import CronTab
cron = CronTab(user=True)
job = cron.new(command='python /Users/<useraccount>/Desktop/my_script.py')
job.minute.on(2)
job.hour.on(12)
cron.write()

Errors:

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "/Users/<useraccount>/Desktop/01-python-crontab.py", line 3, in <module>
 cron = CronTab(user=True)
TypeError: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'user'

• DanielGibbs: It looks like giving the user=True argument isn't valid. Have you looked at the documentation for the crontab module?

Answer 1

Here was the issues:

Error showed up: TypeError: init() takes exactly 2 argument

documentaton: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-crontab helped to resolve the issue.

Reason: 1 - crontab was installed not python-crontab

Here's the completed code:

def main(): 
 from crontab import CronTab
 cron = CronTab(user=True)
 job = cron.new(command='python /opt/my_script.py')
 job.minute.on(2)
 job.hour.on(12)
 cron.write()
if __name__ == "__main__":
 main()

• twegner: This was my exact problem. Un-installing crontab then installing python-crontab fixed my issue.

Answer 2

You may be using an old version of crontab (See - Documentation for 1.4.1 here) . You can either upgrade to latest version of python-crontab using -

pip install python-crontab --upgrade

Or download the 1.9.3 version from here and install it.

If you want to use the old version, you can pass in the username as the argument, Example -

cron = CronTab('<username>')

• Tejas Anil Shah: I was using crontab-0.21.3 instead of python-crontab. Had to 'pip uninstall crontab' and then install the new version. Thanks.