Enabling CivicSpace Automated Tasks: Configuring Cron Jobs

Some CivicSpace modules, such as search, notify and aggregator, have periodic tasks that must be triggered by the script cron.php included with your CivicSpace installation. You can do this manually in your browser by visiting your cron URL page (a blank page will display once the cron tasks have been executed).

However, the better way to do this is to have cron.php executed automatically using the Linux/UNIX crontab function.

• The following example crontab line will activate the cron script
  on the hour:

  0 * * * * wget -O - -q http://www.example.com/cron.php

• If your host has the text browser lynx on the system, make use of the file provided in your Drupal installation in scripts/. Edit scripts/cron-lynx.sh, subsituting the name of your site. Then setup a crontab every hour:
  

  00 * * * * /home/www/drupal/scripts/cron-lynx.sh

Alternatively, Drupal has a poormanscron module available for download. However, this module is much less efficient in terms of system resources compared to the methods described above. The poormanscron module checks to see if cron needs to run every single time a page is viewed on the site.

More information about cron is available in the adminstration help page and at the Drupal Handbook Cron system and crontab page.

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