Cron won't start

Question

I have a smaller Drupal 7 Aquia site and Cron will run successfully if I press the button manually. The issue is that it just won't ever start on its own. The scheduler doesn't seem to be working.

• Cron can finish successfully
• I tried the Elysia Cron module but it doesn't make a difference.
• I've tried visiting the website myself, nothing.
• Visiting the cron page mywebsite.com/cron.php?cron_key=KEYHERE does make cron run, so that's good and well
• I made sure the cron keys match

In my webhosting panel, I have a Cron Job task set up, it looks like :

 /usr/bin/wget -O - -q "http://mywebsite.com/cron.php?cron_key=CRONKEY" > /dev/null 2>&1

What's going wrong and how can I fix the problem where cron just isn't automatically triggered?

Answer 1

It turns out that my Cron panel had a place for email notifications and like @Free Radical said, some output was critical to debugging.

Basically, some website hosters - like GoDaddy - have inexplicably finicky cron processes. The GoDaddy suggested (hah!) cron task of

 /usr/bin/wget -O - -q "http://mywebsite.com/cron.php?cron_key=CRONKEY" > /dev/null 2>&1

was never ever going to work. As with many things webhost, we don't know why, just that it's a no-go. So I went digging on the Drupal forums and found one that was compatible. This works :

 curl http://mywebsite.com/cron.php?cron_key=CRONKEY

So the answer is to give the webhost the finger and use the curl unix command, instead.