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We have two Laravel (L5.7) applications running on a single server through virtual hosts. If I run:

crontab -e

through the terminal I see:

# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
#
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
#
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').#
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
#
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h dom mon dow command

* * * * * php /var/www/html/app1/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1
* * * * * php /var/www/html/app2/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

I've been trying to figure out for a while now why the scheduled tasks aren't firing in Laravel for app2 and came to the conclusion that the cron isn't firing for it. To test this, I fired:

service cron status

and it displayed (among other things) consistently (every minute) the first command was firing:

Mar 06 16:23:01 SRV-PHP7-SVR CRON[22216]: (user) CMD (php /var/www/html/app1/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1)

but nothing for app2. I then did a test by removing the following line:

* * * * * php /var/www/html/app1/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

from the crontab and then when I ran service cron status it showed:

Mar 06 16:16:01 SRV-PHP7-SVR CRON[22033]: (user) CMD (php /var/www/html/app2/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1)

How I can run the same minute cron for both the application without it overlapping?

After b̶a̶n̶g̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶a̶g̶a̶i̶n̶s̶t̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶d̶e̶s̶k̶ doing a lot of debugging, I found out the reasons why my code wasn't firing even though the cron was. It wasn't a crontab issue as I originally thought, it seemed like a permissions issue which wasn't being reported in the logs. Throughout my scheduled function I had scattered around various calls of Log::info:

Log::info('--------------------------------------------------------------------------');
Log::info('--------------------- Cron Fired: ' . date('Y-m-d H:i:s') . ' --------------------');
Log::info('--------------------------------------------------------------------------');

and it seems like they were causing the issue. The way I came to this conclusion was to comment out all the Log::info calls and create a small table called cron which had two columns; log and created_at, I then put the following snippet into the function which was set to fire every minute:

DB::table('cron')->insert(['log' => 'Scheduler found ' . $rows->count() . ' rows that need to be checked']);

and it consistently created rows every minute unlike when I was using Log::info.

What complicated my issue further was that when I was firing the schedule manually, I was running the following command:

sudo php artisan schedule:run

and the permissions issue was no longer an issue because of the sudo, consequently, that increased the debugging time.