You might wonder what that first line, #!/usr/bin/python3, is. The script text is as follows if you want to use the same script: The cron_test.py script simply creates a directory with the current date and time as the name. Note: This Python script needs to be executable so change the permissions on it to allow for that, I just ran a chmod 777 cron_test.py. I’ve already created a directory /Documents/Python/cron in my home directory and created a simple script called cron_test.py. You will include this path in your cron job syntax, which we’ll get into.īefore we write our cron job, we should have a script we want to run. It should display /usr/local/bin/python3 (which is an alias for the actual Homebrew installation location but that’s fine, we won’t go into that right now). You can do so by typing which python3 in your terminal.

You can write the job to run a shell script or a Python script in this case.Īssuming you followed the Homebrew guide above, double-check your Python installation path. This should open up an empty file, this is where you will write your cron jobs. We will be using Mac OS’s in-built crontab feature to write our cron jobs. Open up your terminal command prompt on your Mac and navigate to the home directory by running cd ~/. I followed Real Python’s guide to install Python 3 via Homebrew (a quick few steps really) so I will assume you have done the same going forward in this post. Few to no developers are updating modules in this version so when you’re building projects, it’s best to have the latest version of Python installed. So, let’s say you’re on your Mac and have the default Python distribution, which I believe should be 2.7.10. I uninstalled my Python 3.x versions I had installed (via pip and Conda) and started from scratch - uninstalling was also a hassle.

I won’t get into my errors in this post but you’re free to use any other Python installation if you like. I frequently got errors about not being able to open the file I wanted to execute or not finding the installed Python version. Homebrew is a package manager just like pip and Anaconda and frankly, I’m just using that in this example because I tried for hours to run a simple cron job to no avail. Before I write the steps below, I would recommend installing the latest version of Python with Homebrew.

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