Page Error Capture

NZ_Kiwis

I'm not sure if this is possible, if so how...

I have a cron job to run a page on my website. I actually have about 10 jobs on various sites.

However one runs, it runs most of the time 100% find but every now and then it fails. If there a way to capture an error on a page and email it? is that possible?

NogDog

It's certainly possible. The Devil-is-in-the-details part will be how to detect when there is an error. Does the cron script itself throw an exception, or do you have to detect the HTTP response code form the web page, or do you have to parse the HTML (or JSON or whatever) output of the web request, etc.?

dalecosp

Cron, generally, sends email to its owner when it runs anyway, so the first thing you should do is make sure that email to the "owner" is directed to a mailbox you have access to. Depending on your hosting situation, that could be easy, or it could be nigh impossible.

As NogDog suggests, debugging it will be harder than reading normal job output. However, if you can code your jobs to handle most types of errors with tests, exceptions, trigger_error(), what-not, it's possible you could also get that in your email.

Here's an email I received recently from a cronjob, and I didn't really have to code anything:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught exception 'GrabzItException' with message 'The screenshot did not complete with the error: ' in
+/var/www/apache24/data/my.com/html/GrabzIt/php/lib/GrabzItClient.class.php:219
Stack trace:
#0 /var/www/apache24/data/my.com/html/GrabzIt/fetch_screenies.php(48): GrabzItClient->SaveTo('/usr/local/www/...')
#1 {main}
  thrown in /var/www/apache24/data/my.com/html/GrabzIt/php/lib/GrabzItClient.class.php on line 219

Unfortunately it's not OVERLY informative. But it's a start.