Magento 2 Adventures: Cron Jobs

Wanting to explore other CMS’s, I downloaded and installed locally Magento 2, community edition. Some research and playing around locally allowed me to create various types of products including simple and configurable. I then proceeded to create a little store. I wanted to take it further, so I freed up one of my databases through my online hosting company, installed Magento 2 on a subdomain, and voila: my own online store.

Immediately after logging into the site I was greeted with error messages. I tried to systematically meet each of their needs, but there was one I was unable to clear up. It reads:

“One or more indexers are invalid. Make sure your Magento cron job is running.”

Some digging on the Magento dev docs lead me to this answer:

bin/magento indexer:reindex

I then looked up How to Run a Cron Job with my hosting provider.

I followed the steps and looked at the other cron jobs currently running which were set-up by the installer.

I came up with the following:

php /home/myusername/mysubdomain.amybaldwindev.com/bin/magento indexer:reindex

It didn’t work. I emailed the hosting provider for further support, but they indicated my question was out-of-scope.

I charged on, and started creating items for my store but ran into several other errors, such as products not appearing in the storefront. It’s not clear if these problems are stemming from this error, but it seems a good start before troubleshooting further.