I have a Plesk 10 server and I have a user that needs to run some php cron scripts that login to their mysql db and make some changes each night. I tried to allow them a chrooted environment, but php and mysql are not available in that environment. I was able to get php running and all the libraries loaded, by copying what was need for them, but I can't get php to load the mysql library. Does anyone know if this is the best way to do this? Is there a better, safer way to allow this? If this is the best way, how do I load mysql with php in this chrooted environment?

I thought Plesk did cron jobs for them under their FTP user

It is run under their ftp user. But that has no access to php. It seems like the cron jobs run chrooted. Is that not right? I enter a job with the command "php -q /path/to/file" and I get "php: command not found" or "/usr/bin/php -q /path/to/file" and I get "/usr/bin/php: No such file or directory".

I do know that I can set the ssh setting under Web Hosting Settings to /bin/bash and it will work, but is that a good idea? If I set that to forbidden (which I normally do), it seems to be chrooted when it runs.

So you're testing this with the CLI? And there's two /bin/bash, one is chrooted (at least in mine there is)

Personally I simply do a wget via http.

e.g.:


And I seem to recall that wget has options that allow you to specify username/password credentials, so you can place the file you want to run in a proteted directory so that it doesn't get accidentally run or accessed by anyone.

highland - Yes, there are two. If I set it to /bin/bash, the cron job runs fine, but I really don't want to give this user that access to the system. If I set it to /bin/bash (chrooted), I run into the original problem that php is unknown. So that is when I started copying files to to that web users directory so they would have access to php in their chrooted environment. I got all the libraries needed to run php, I just can't get php to use the mysql library. If I could get that part working, I would be set.

faris - Great idea. I might just settle on this idea as it will cause the least amount of configuration changes to get the same result.