Thread

I am trying to use a couple of the EE Cron Plugins.  Yes, I have the EE Cron plugin as well.  For some reason my brain is not making the specific neurotransmitter connection to understand the usage of the plugin. (Must be the 138 F degree weather here) 

Do the exp:cron whatevers have to be loaded in a template somewhere within the site so they are triggered when someone loads the template (like the moblog checker works), or can I just create a separate unreferenced template in my hidden system templates and EE will handle it automatically?

Thanks..

The tag has to be on a template that will be loaded- like the moblog check.  PHP can’t run a ‘true cron’- a page load has to kick off the date check and things will follow from there.

Make sense or is it still fuzzy?

Yea, thats pretty much what I figured, but its amazing how sometimes you can stare at something and its just doesn’t come into focus.. 😊

I am still a little confused. If I want something run every hour, but the template that the cron plugin tag is on only gets loaded once a week, how does it work?

Why use this instead of just putting the command you want run in the template?

I must be missing something.

Hi, Erin,

If the template is only visited once a week then the cron will only be triggered once a week.

You would use this rather than the direct command for something you don’t want happening on *every* template load, but happening regularly, like a database backup or some such.

Ah, OK. I just saw in the LinkList documentation that the check-for-update functionality could be put in a cron job and got confused.

Thanks

Is there a unix style command for linklist or do I have to put the tag in a template and call that file from cron? 

Regards,

Rick

As far as I know it has to go into a template, but you could probably create a standard cron job to visit that template so your visitors don’t have to.

Thanks Lisa!  Yes, my plan is to just pull up the page via lynx.  I just noticed a reference to entering a cron entry for it in the linklist docs and then searched the forums and found these posts and figure I would ask just in case 😊.

As always… thanks for your prompt response!

For the somewhat advanced users… you could look at the system crontab for
more precise timed jobs. I first tried on my local mac and our (linux) server if
it could run php from the shell. Type: “php—help” if that works then basically
you’re able to add cronjobs like “php dostuff.php”

An alternative (i just found googling) if you don’t have lynx by default (like me on a mac),
or don’t wanna hassle with tricky specific php for the command-line, you could
use “curl” instead “curl http://example.com/cron.php >> ~/somedir/logfile”
(found via: clampcampus.com/ ... /crontab wordpress or shell scripting for dummies)

Yes, curl works well.  That is what I ended up using.  I setup the commands on wanted to run in a script and ran the script via cron.  Very simple.

For anyone that is reading this post and needs help.  Here’s a copy of the script file that I created.
hrly_crons.sh

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/curl -s <a href="http://domain.com/amember/cron.php">http://domain.com/amember/cron.php</a>
/usr/bin/curl -s <a href="http://domain.com/index.php/crons/">http://domain.com/index.php/crons/</a>

Regards,

Rick