Run Python script from Ubuntu cronjob

Question

I am trying to run a simple python script on a VM running Ubuntu 18 hosted on my Synology. The python script simply prints date and time in a file so I can check if it ran or not. It looks like this:

from datetime import datetime
with open('file.txt','a') as file:
    file.write('Recorded at: %s\n' % datetime.now())

I made a cronjob that looks like this:

* * * * * /home/anaconda3/bin/python3.7 /home/Documents/crontest.py

I have tried many variations. For instance not writing 3.7 and just simply write 'python'. I tried the default python path /usr/bin/python3.7.

Furthermore I tried to ad the shebang #!/home/anaconda/bin/python3.7 to the script and leaving out the path in the cronjob.

It feels like I am missing something elementary here. I tried many options as posted on Stack and other forums, but none of the options seem to fix my problem.

Answer 1

Using relative links in python scripts is not allowed when running cronjobs. So it works when I write it like this:

from datetime import datetime
with open('/home/Documents/file.txt','a') as file:
    file.write('Recorded at: %s\n' % datetime.now())

Furthermore, I used the wrong path to python. I wrote /python3.6 instead of /python3 which I found through typing

which python3

in terminal.