Rails Whenever gem cron fe_sendauth: no password supplied - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am running a Rails server that periodically runs a rake task using whenever gem and cron.
I can run the rake task using these successfully. On my remote server, I am running that as the root. This second attempt also works.
RAILS_ENV=production rake fetch_myitems
// attempt 1
//attempt 2
/bin/bash -l -c 'cd /home/rails/AniKawaii && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake fetch_animegifs --silent >> log/whenever.log 2>&1'
After debugging, this is what I ended up with as the source of error. I understand that this is related to database.yml. However I can deploy to my live production server successfully and calling RAILS_ENV=production rake fetch_myitems does not trigger this error so I am confused as to what to do.
PG::ConnectionBad: fe_sendauth: no password supplied
Crontab -l
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /home/rails/AniKawaii && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake fetch_animegifs --silent >> log/whenever.log 2>&1'

Answer 1

For some reason in /etc/default/unicorn file the APP_DATABASE_PASSWORD does not get updated even if I reload nginx along with unicorn.
My fix was to manually override the password in database.yml.

Answer 2

My guess is that your database.yml file looks something like:
production:
adapter: postgresql
encoding: unicode
database: test-postgres_production
pool: 5
username: rails
password: <%= ENV['PGPASS'] %>
Meaning that the password is obtained from an environment variable. Your cronjob should look something like:
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /home/rails/AniKawaii && RAILS_ENV=production PGPASS=your_database_password_here bundle exec rake fetch_animegifs --silent >> log/whenever.log 2>&1'
Hope that sorts you.