Crontab to reload PM2 cluster processes - pm2

Question

I'm around this issue for one day with no effective results. Imagine I want to reload (zero downtime, thus not restart) a PM2 cluster process every hour with crontab.
The PM2 app is this one, which I start with sudo pm2 start app.json (btw, I think it's not relevant, but I'm using pm2 as sudo, I can't recall why)
{
"apps" : [{
"name" : "autocosts.prod",
"script" : "bin/server.js",
"cwd" : "/var/www/autocosts.prod/",
"node_args" : "--use_strict",
"args" : "-r prod --print --pdf --social --googleCaptcha --googleAnalytics --database",
"exec_mode" : "cluster",
"instances" : 4,
"wait_ready" : true,
"listen_timeout" : 50000,
"watch" : false,
"exp_backoff_restart_delay" : 200,
"env": {
"NODE_ENV": "production"
},
"log_date_format": "DD-MM-YYYY"
}]
}
My crontab line is
# reload every hour
0 * * * * /usr/local/bin/node /usr/local/bin/pm2 reload /var/www/autocosts.prod/app.json > /var/log/pm2/app.cron.log 2>&1
But on that log file I get an error
[PM2] Applying action reloadProcessId on app [autocosts.prod](ids: [ 0, 1, 2, 3 ])
[PM2][ERROR] Process 0 not found
Process 0 not found
It seems PM2 can't detect the id numbers of the cluster.
How to have crontabs to reload (zero downtime) a PM2 cluster process?

Answer 1

I found the problem, was indeed due to the fact that I was using pm2 as sudo and crontab in sudo mode has no access to a series of environments.
Change owner of PM2 to yourself (do which pm2 to find the full path of the executable), such that you can use it without sudo. Do the same for ~/.pm2.