Answer by wisbucky for How to set virtualenv for a crontab?

I'm not sure about workon, but it's pretty straightforward for venv. The only thing to remember is that crontab uses sh by default, not bash, so you need to use the . command instead of source.

Here are examples if you have a file ~/myproject/main.py:

* * * * * cd ~/myproject && . .venv/bin/activate && python main.py > /tmp/out1 2>&1

You could also directly call the specific path of the python in the venv directory, then you don't need to call activate.

* * * * * ~/myproject/.venv/bin/python ~/myproject/main.py > /tmp/out2 2>&1

The downside of that is you would need to specify the project path twice, which makes maintenance trickier. To avoid that, you could use a shell variable so you only specify the project path once:

* * * * * project_dir=~/myproject ; $project_dir/.venv/bin/python $project_dir/main.py > /tmp/out3 2>&1