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Running Shells as Cron Jobs

A common thing to do with a shell is making it run as a cronjob to clean up the database once in a while or send newsletters. This is trivial to setup, for example:

  */5  *    *    *    *  cd /full/path/to/root && bin/cake myshell myparam
# *    *    *    *    *  command to execute
# │    │    │    │    │
# │    │    │    │    │
# │    │    │    │    \───── day of week (0 - 6) (0 to 6 are Sunday to Saturday,
# |    |    |    |           or use names)
# │    │    │    \────────── month (1 - 12)
# │    │    \─────────────── day of month (1 - 31)
# │    \──────────────────── hour (0 - 23)
# \───────────────────────── min (0 - 59)

You can see more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron

Tip

Use -q (or –quiet) to silence any output for cronjobs.

Cron Jobs on Shared Hosting

On some shared hostings cd /full/path/to/root && bin/cake mycommand myparam might not work. Instead you can use php /full/path/to/root/bin/cake.php mycommand myparam.

Note

register_argc_argv has to be turned on by including register_argc_argv = 1 in your php.ini. If you cannot change register_argc_argv globally, you can tell the cron job to use your own configuration by specifying it with -d register_argc_argv=1 parameter. Example: php -d register_argc_argv=1 /full/path/to/root/bin/cake.php myshell myparam