Occasional virtualenv: command not found

#1

certbot-auto is setup to run every 12 hours via cron and usually runs without issue. But twice in the last two months, certbot-auto will exit with the below virtualenv error, and cron sends me a failure email. I’d like to see if there is a reason for these failures or if we should just ignore them.

First failure happened on Jan 3rd, and second on Jan 25th.

My domain is: syr.criticallink.com

I ran this command: sudo /etc/letsencrypt/certbot-auto renew -q

It produced this output:

/etc/letsencrypt/certbot-auto: line 1004: virtualenv: command not found

My web server is (include version):
apache

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):
$ lsb_release -d
Description: Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don’t know): yes

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you’re using Certbot):
$ sudo /etc/letsencrypt/certbot-auto --version
certbot 0.30.1

#2

Hi,

Can you please check if virtualenv is installed?
Also, what version of python are you using?

Thank you

#3

It would have to be installed for the tool to work most of the time.

 $ which virtualenv
/usr/local/bin/virtualenv
 $ virtualenv --version
16.0.0
 $ python --version
Python 2.7.12
#4

Just to be sure, is that exactly how it is shown with:
crontab -l

#5 
 $ sudo crontab -l
...
# Every 12 hours check for letsencrypt renew
0 */12 * * * /etc/letsencrypt/certbot-auto renew -q
#6

A coworker pointed out that virtualenv is installed in several ways.

which virtualenv --> /usr/local/bin/virtualenv
dpkg --listfiles virtualenv --> /usr/bin/virtualenv [which does not exist ]

 $ pip list | grep virt
virtualenv                   16.0.0               
virtualenv-clone             0.3.0                

[/usr/local/bin/virtualenv is installed via pip]

dpkg --get-selections|grep virtualenv

python-virtualenv                               install
python3-virtualenv                              install
virtualenv                                      install

Which I think is throwing off the script. I think it sees that virtualenv package is installed and expects virtualenv to be in the path, but it is in /usr/local/bin instead and it cannot find it. I don’t think /usr/local/bin is in the PATH for root crontab.

Strangely this seems to work most of the time

#7

Updated cron entry to specify the /usr/local/bin. Quick tests look promising.

# Every 12 hours check for letsencrypt renew
0 */12 * * * PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin /etc/letsencrypt/certbot-auto renew -q