After starting to use Drush, I wanted to switch my Drupal cron jobs over to it. I’d previously been running these jobs the standard way, loading a URL for each of my Drupal sites with curl. That curl command was run by the cron; Site5 allows editing of your crontab directly or through its Backstage Web interface.
I started with the basics. Drush was installed in my home directory, with an alias under ~/bin in my Site5 account. I replaced my curl command one-for-one with the following:
—quiet \
—root=/home/your_site5_account/public_html/your_drupal_site/ \
cron
This didn’t work out well. I was getting a huge number of mail messages, indicating problems with the cron jobs. The messages typically contained “tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified.” Needless to say, this was rather frustrating, so after some trial and error, I modified the command as follows, and that has been working better for me.
-d memory_limit=64M \
/home/your_site5_account/drush/drush.php \
—quiet \
—root=/home/your_site5_account/public_html/your_drupal_site/ \
cron
The biggest change is that I specify PHP, rather than Drush, directly. This was done so that I could increase the PHP memory limit for the cron job significantly, to 64M, while running Drush. I’m sure that this increase was needed partly due to the number of modules I have installed on my main site (which has an even larger default PHP memory limit in its php.ini). My research indicated that I needed to do this for Drush since it doesn’t access the Drupal sites in the same way loading a page does.
The other noticeable change is that I provide the path to the drush.php file rather than pointing to the Drush alias.
