Kicking Nextcloud Cron Script from TrueNAS Cron Job

Tl;DR

I’m running TrueCharts Nextcloud in my TrueNAS SCALE at home. After the setup, I discovered that none of the cron jobs was running. I’m using the Nextcloud News App and never saw any new stories. I didn’t find a way to make the Nextcloud cron work, so I decided to have a cron job that runs every hour to kick the Nextclodu cron job in the Nextcloud docker container.

Setup

After reading how to trigger the Nextcloud Preview generator manually, I thought this approach would help me to solve my problem with the cron job and the missing News App updates.

After some experimenting, I came up with this docker command.

/usr/bin/docker exec -t --user 33 $(docker ps -qf "name=k8s_nextcloud_nextcloud") /usr/local/bin/php cron.php

Once I verified that the script was working for me, I created a cron job in TrueNAS to execute this script every hour.