If you execute mysqldump manually, mysqldump will prompt you for password. If you setup mysqldump via cronjob, you need to find a solution to disable the password. I’ve setup mysqldump to backup my db via cronjob without password. All you need to do is just to add a file in your home directory and it will disable the mysqldump password prompting

To Setup Mysqldump Without Password in Cronjob, follow the steps below

Start your terminal and login to your server. Create a .my.cnf file in the home director.

user@server:~ nano ~/.my.cnf

Copy the content below and replace with your mysql username and password.

[mysqldump]
user = mysqluser
password = secret

Now change the file permission to 600 to prevent other user from reading it

user@server:~ chmod 600 ~/.my.cnf

Now you can try to execute mysqldump and system will not prompt you for password by now To setup the cronjob

user@server:~ crontab -e

Append the line below to your crontab and it will run mysqldump every night at 12:00am

0 * * * mysqldump -u mysqluser -h localhost --all-databases | gzip -9  > alldb.sql.gz > /dev/null