Crontab and Tmux not playing well together

Question

So I want my server to run a script which starts several tmux sessions on boot.
This is my crontab:

@reboot . /home/steven/.profile; /home/steven/Scripts/Start.sh  

And this is the content of my Start.sh

#!/bin/bash  

cd ~/Scripts/  

echo "Mounting all drives..."
sudo mount -a
echo "Mounting finished."

echo "Starting Wemo Server..."
tmux new -s "wemo" -d
tmux send -t "wemo" $'./start_wemo_server.sh\n'
if (tmux list-sessions | grep "wemo");
    then
        echo "Wemo Server Ouimeaux started."
    else 
        echo "Tmux error @ wemo server."
fi

echo "Starting GoDaddy Dynamic DNS Service..."
tmux new -ds "godaddy"
tmux send -t "godaddy" $'./start_godaddy_dyndns.sh\n'
if (tmux list-sessions | grep "godaddy");
    then
        echo "GoDaddy Dynamic DNS Service started."
    else
        echo "Tmux error @ GoDaddy."
fi

echo "Starting Plex..."
sudo service plexmediaserver start
echo "Plex started."

echo "Starting PlexConnect Server..."
tmux new -ds "plex"
tmux send -t "plex" $'./start_plex_connect.sh\n'

if (tmux list-sessions | grep "plex");
    then
        echo "PlexConnect Server started."
    else
        echo "Tmux error @ Plex."
fi

echo "All starting sequences are finished. Quitting..."  

If I start this script manually (i.e. ./Scripts/Start.sh), everything works just fine, tmux loads my profile nicely and everything is okay. However if I set the crontab to start this script, tmux doesn't load the profile, .bashrc isn't loaded, I can't even use Up Arrow key to recall previous commands, or Tab to autocomplete.

This is really rather annoying because I use tmux during the day all the time, I can't live with a broken tmux session.

Does anyone have an idea of how this can be fixed or what I've done wrong?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Wherever your personal settings are loaded, depending on OS and preference, you need to source that file in the script so that it functions as it would if you were running it yourself in the terminal.

source or . is a command that functions sort of like import in other scripting/programming languages. Also note that if you use . instead of source, there should be a space between the . and the path to the profile you are sourcing:

. /home/username/.profile

At the beginning of your script, after #!/bin/bash, simply add source /home/yourusername/.profile (or .bashrc or whatever you are using to load your settings).

Double-check the permissions/ownership of the file, and make sure it's running in your personal crontab and not root's crontab, which would mess everything up if you were trying to run it as a normal user.

Also, like I said in my comment, it never hurts to include absolute paths in scripts that are being executed via cron. I believe you have multiple instances referencing ~/something or ./somescript. For instance, instead of cd ~/Scripts, use cd /home/username/Scripts, so that there can be no mistake of where this directory is located.

This is the point of source-ing your .profile, because that is normally where the $HOME variable (~) gets set. The way to avoid any discrepancy whatsoever, is just include absolutely paths to directories and scripts when you know jobs will be executed via cron.