cron.php does not work

Question

I am trying to start the cronjob via shell, as it does not execute via crontab.

When I type php5 cron.php The output is only

X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.26
Content-type: text/html

And no jobs are beeing executed.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You are not using the CLI version of PHP. Ask your hoster which command to use or if you want to try finding it yourself, type:

ls -l `which php5`

which shows you where php5 is located and if it is a symlink. then look in the directory (or the directory of the symlink) if you can find something like php5-cli

Also, you should specify the mode like this:

php cron.php -mdefault
php cron.php -malways

Otherwise, cron.php starts cron.sh which then spawns cron.php again with both variations. Also it redirects all output to /dev/null.

I strongly recommend using the alternative cron runner from Aoe_Scheduler which gives you much more control and information. Also it explains you exactly how to set up the system cronjob.