crontab : run as user www-data ?

[fenugrec]

Hi, in the recent commits you added a crontab to periodically run the "partkeepr:cron:run" task. Great ! However I notice that the command is run as root by default; shouldn't it run as www-data ? (at least according to https://wiki.partkeepr.org/wiki/PartKeepr_on_Debian_%22Stretch%22 ) I verified this first with a crontab containing

*/1 * * * * whoami > /tmp/w

then checking that indeed it's running as root. At first I tried the following modification

*/1 * * * * www-data whoami > /tmp/w

but it looks like that syntax is maybe not correct or not supported ? [EDIT - I may have made an error when testing, I forgot to delete /tmp/w which was still owned by root so www-data wasn't able to overwrite it...]

So instead we could change docker-compose.yml to run this instead: command: bash -c "crontab -u www-data /etc/cron.d/partkeepr && cron -f"

What do you think ?

[fenugrec]

As a side-note, doesn't that periodic task need to run in the container that has app/cache ? or is there an interaction I don't understand between the cronjob and partkeepr containers ?

[mhubig]

Hi @fenugrec,

thanks for the succession. Yes it's better to run cron as www-data I'll give it a try or be happy to accept a PR. The interaction between the partkeepr container and the cronjob container is via the mounted volumes and by the use of the same database ...