Cronjob Redux

After days of trying to figure this out, I finally got the video to upload via a cronjob.

There were 2 issues.

Issue the first

Finally found the issue. Original script from YouTube developers guidehad this:

CLIENT_SECRETS_FILE = "client_secrets.json"

And then a couple of lines later, this:

% os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), CLIENT_SECRETS_FILE))

When crontab would run the script it would run from a path that wasn’t where the CLIENT_SECRETS_FILE file was and so a message would be displayed:

WARNING: Please configure OAuth 2.0

To make this sample run you will need to populate the client_secrets.json file
found at:

  %s

with information from the Developers Console
https://console.developers.google.com/

For more information about the client_secrets.json file format, please visit:
https://developers.google.com/api-client-library/python/guide/aaa_client_secrets

What I needed to do was to update the CLIENT_SECRETS_FILE to be the whole path so that it could always find the file.

A simple change:

CLIENT_SECRETS_FILE  = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), CLIENT_SECRETS_FILE))

Issue the second

When the create_mp4.sh script would run it was reading all of the h264 files from the directory where they lived BUT they were attempting to output the mp4 file to / which it didn’t have permission to write to.

This was failing silently (I’m still not sure how I could have caught the error). Since there was no mp4 file to upload that script was failing (though it was true that the location of the CLIENT_SECRETS_FILE was an issue).

What I needed to do was change the create_mp4.sh file so that when the MP4Box command output the mp4 file to the proper directory. The script went from this:

(echo '#!/bin/sh'; echo -n "MP4Box"; array=($(ls ~/Documents/python_projects/*.h264)); for index in ${!array[@]}; do if [ "$index" -eq 0 ]; then echo -n " -add ${array[index]}"; else echo -n " -cat ${array[index]}"; fi; done; echo -n " hummingbird.mp4") > create_mp4.sh

To this:

(echo '#!/bin/sh'; echo -n "MP4Box"; array=($(ls ~/Documents/python_projects/*.h264)); for index in ${!array[@]}; do if [ "$index" -eq 0 ]; then echo -n " -add ${array[index]}"; else echo -n " -cat ${array[index]}"; fi; done; echo -n " /home/pi/Documents/python_projects/hummingbird.mp4") > /home/pi/Documents/python_projects/create_mp4.sh

The last bit /home/pi/Documents/python_projects/create_mp4.sh may not be neccesary but I’m not taking any chances.

The video posted tonight is the first one that was completely automatic!

Now … if I could just figure out how to automatically fill up my hummingbird feeder.