gio in cronjob

gio provides a nice API to deal with VFS. I am using it to mount a NAS harddrive to use for backups.

The problem is that using it from cronjobs is not straightfoward. I got the following errors when trying to run gio info and gio mount from a cronjob:

gio: smb://internetbox-nas.local/philips%20ufd/: Operation not supported
gio: smb://internetbox-nas.local/philips%20ufd/: volume doesn’t implement mount

I didn't find the right answer in Google, so I am sharing it here in case someone else is affected.

The culprit is that cronjobs run in a very limited environment, and gio requires some environmental variables to be set. So, just add these to your cronjob:

XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share/ubuntu:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/:/var/lib/snapd/desktop
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus

Adapt the user_id to fit your needs, id -u may be helpful, too.