Error when sending page as CRON job

[BFD Calendar]

I have a template that collects pages based on a date search (today). I send that page to a blog (https://wheniwasbuyingyouadrinkwherewereyou.blogspot.com) with php:

$to = "xxxx@blogger.com";
    $headers = "From: ddv@birthfactdeathcalendar.net\r\n";
    $headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
    $headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8' . "\r\n";

When I load the page in my browser it is sent correctly. When I have it sent by a scheduled CRON job (OVH hosting) I get this error:

[2026-03-09 10:27:02] ## OVH ## START - 2026-03-09 10:27:02.711006 executing: /usr/local/php8.2/bin/php /homez.863/birthfac/www/site/templates/bfd_mailer.php 
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] 
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] 
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] <center>
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] <table width="700">
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] <tr><td>
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] <b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Trebuchet MS&quot;,sans-serif;">
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] <a href="http://www.birthfactdeathcalendar.net">BIRTH(+)FACT(&#5742;)DEATH(-)</a></span></span></b>
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] <br>
[2026-03-09 10:27:02]     <span style='font-size: large;'><span style='font-family: Georgia,&quot;Times New Roman&quot;,serif;'>41st year  -  Nº 68 Monday, 9 March 2026</span></span>        
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] </td></tr>
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] <tr><td>
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] 
[2026-03-09 10:27:02]     
[2026-03-09 10:27:02] ## OVH ## END - 2026-03-09 10:27:02.781779 exitcode: 255

What could be the problem?

[monollonom]

With a quick search it looks like this is an issue from OVH rather than from PW. Do you have enough traffic to consider using LazyCron instead?

[BFD Calendar]

Thanks, looks well worth trying this. According to Matomo I had 31 visitors in the last 24 hours, according to OVH statistics it's 5000, but that includes several bots. Don't know if they will count as valid traffic.

[BFD Calendar]

10 hours ago, monollonom said:

Do you have enough traffic to consider using LazyCron instead?

Tried several things with LazyCron but no success yet. I tried calling it from ready.php but then -if- it works I don't think it would allow loading my bfd_mailer template once a day, say at 1pm.

[monollonom]

6 hours ago, BFD Calendar said:

I tried calling it from ready.php but then -if- it works I don't think it would allow loading my bfd_mailer template once a day, say at 1pm.

Do you mean your LazyCron hook is not triggered?

[BFD Calendar]

20 hours ago, monollonom said:

Do you mean your LazyCron hook is not triggered?

Maybe I'm not doing it right....

$this->addHookAfter('LazyCron::every5Minutes', function(HookEvent $event) {
PageRender::renderPage(bfd_mailer_cron.php);
echo "mailer sent";
	};

On the other hand, I'm trying with an OVH cron job. As soon as I enter this on the mailer page

    $features = $pages->find('parent=/events/|/the-eyes/, bfd_day.name=$todayday, bfd_month.name=$todaymonth');

the job doesn't work. I presume it doesn't understand the ProcessWire api....

And then I'm not sure if this is the right way to do what I actually want, sending a ProcessWire page once a day at 10am to one or several email adresses. It used to work with a OVH cron job for years but I guess there's been a few changes between PHP 5 and 8.2 that are in the way.

[monollonom]

19 hours ago, BFD Calendar said:

I presume it doesn't understand the ProcessWire api....

If your CRON is directly calling your template’s php file then yes it won’t work because ProcessWire isn’t bootstrapped.

For a client I’m also using a CRON job that calls: "wget -qO /dev/null https://myclient.com/path/to/page". It basically triggers a GET request and thus renders a page with my script in it (it also sends an email). But it seems OVH only allow to execute a php script so maybe you should look into bootstrapping PW, something like:

<?php namespace ProcessWire;
include("/path/to/your/pw/installation/index.php");
$pages->get("/your/mailer/")->renderPage();

Regarding your LazyCron PageRender::renderPage is not a static function so it wouldn’t work this way, you should instead do something like:

<?php namespace ProcessWire;
// in your init.php or ready.php
$wire->addHookAfter('LazyCron::everyDay', function(HookEvent $event) {
	$event->wire()->pages->get("/your/mailer")->renderPage();
	$event->log("mailer sent");
};

I’m only surprised by this, maybe they changed something in the meantime...

20 hours ago, BFD Calendar said:

It used to work with a OVH cron job for years but I guess there's been a few changes between PHP 5 and 8.2 that are in the way.

[BFD Calendar]

The problem is obviously with OVH not allowing the script. It made me move to the free cron-job.org service. I've been testing for a day now and it works well when the mail is sent to my own address. From tomorrow on the job is scheduled to go once a day to blogger.com to post from mail there.

One change between my old php 5 and 8.2 is that "template==template_name" should now be "template=='template_name'".

[BFD Calendar]

And regarding LazyCron, I keep getting these files-errors every few hours: "unlink: Unable to unlink file: /site/assets/cache/LazyCronLock.cache". How to get rid of those?