Installation and Maintenance
Cron jobs
Setting up cron jobs
A cron job is an automated process that operates at predefined time intervals.
As an example, you can set up a cron job that checks your ILIAS installation every day at 2:00 am for limited user accounts and sends an email notification to users whose account expires within the next 2 weeks.
How to enable this cron job?
- you need write access to the file /etc/crontab
- add the following line in /etc/crontab:
Cron Job Execution ILIAS < 9.x
0 2 * * * APACHEUSER /usr/bin/php ILIAS_ABSOLUTE_PATH/cron/cron.php ILIAS_ADMIN ILIAS_ADMIN_PWD CLIENT > /dev/null
Execution in ILIAS >= 9.x
0 2 * * * APACHEUSER /usr/bin/php ILIAS_ABSOLUTE_PATH/cron/cron.php run-jobs ILIAS_USER CLIENT > /dev/null
Scheduling
To understand this even more, I'll show you what each of the values mean for the above cron tab.
0 | Minutes after the hour |
2 | Hours of the day |
* | Days of the month |
* | Month of the year |
* | Week days of the week |
APACHEUSER | The user which runs the cron job. Should be the same as the apache user (wwwrun) |
ILIAS_ABSOLUTE_PATH | The absolute path to your ILIAS installation |
ILIAS_ADMIN ILIAS / ILIAS_USER | (Administrator's) user name |
ILIAS_ADMIN_PWD | Password of ILIAS admin |
CLIENT | Client name of ILIAS installation |
This example executes the script cron.php every night at 2 a.m.