Crontab is not working on Amazon EC2 server

Question

Crontab is not working on Amazon EC2 Linux Server.

I have saved below codes in /etc/crontab file

crontab
# For details see man 4 crontabs 
# Example          


        

Answer 1

You should use crontab -e to create cron for the logged user, so that you don't need to inform the username. See here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16986464/1777152

Answer 2

Solved the problem.

I used this code and it works!

* 2 * * * root tar cvfpz /home/backup/web_`date +\%Y\%m\%d`.tar.gz /home/web

Answer 3

Don't use nano, use the native sudo crontab -e command.

Answer 4

For people who are dealing with AWS machines and EBS you need to specify the root keyword before the command since ec2-user isn't allowed to run crontabs. Of course there's a way to fix that.

you can edit the crontab by typing sudo nano /etc/cron.d/mycrontabs or crontab -e

* * * * * root bla bla

• Also make sure e that the file is ended with a new line

Answer 5

I recently began using Amazon's linux distro on ec2 instances and after trying all kinds of things for cron all I needed was:
sudo service crond start
crontab -e
This allowed me to set a cron job as "ec2-user" without specifying the user. For example:
0 12 * * * python3 example.py
In fact, specifying a user here prevented it from running.