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Cron

More often than not, it is essential to run regular time-based background jobs in business applications. These jobs can be maintenance tasks, such as checking for updates or synchronizing data between integrated systems, and business-related tasks, such as generating reports, sending emails, or making timely-based shifts in tasks determined by your business process flows.

The nature and algorithms of these timely-based tasks can be diverse and complicated, and the obvious way of implementing these jobs is to create specific program components.

Therefore, to strengthen the task to create and schedule such components, OroPlatform provides the OroCronBundle . With its help, it is considerably easier to run Symfony Console commands through cronjobs (on UNIX-based operating systems) or the Windows task scheduler.

OroCronBundle provides CronCommandInterface and two console commands to set up the cron tasks schedule.

CronCommandInterface allows defining the console command along with its schedule in a crontab compatible string in the command class.

The oro:cron:definitions:load command scans for all commands from the oro:cron namespace that implements the CronCommandInterface. For each detected command, a new Schedule entry is created and saved into the database. This command runs on install and update, and can also be run manually if some cron commands or command definitions are changed.

The second command is oro:cron. It takes all schedules from the database (created by the oro:cron:definitions:load command) and adds the commands that are due to the Message Queue. This command should run every minute.

Note

Please notice that oro:cron:definitions:load removes all previously loaded commands from the database. So if other commands add cron commands to the db (such as oro:workflow:definition:load), they should be run after oro:cron:definitions:load.

Setup and Configuration

To run a set of commands from your application regularly, configure your system to run the oro:cron command every minute.

  • For UNIX-based systems, set up a crontab entry, as illustrated below:

    */1 * * * * /path/to/php /path/to/bin/console oro:cron --env=prod > /dev/null

    Note

    Some OS flavors require a username (usually root) in the crontab entry:

    */1 * * * * root /path/to/php /path/to/bin/console oro:cron --env=prod > /dev/null

  • For Windows, use the Control Panel to configure the Task Scheduler to do the same.

    Note

    This entry in the crontab does not presuppose the execution of cron commands every minute. The oro:cron command only ensures that the actual commands are added to the scheduler which in its turn makes sure that they are executed at desired time.

Scheduled Commands in OroPlatform

A scheduled command in OroPlatform is a regular Symfony console command that implements additional CronCommandInterface and has the oro:cron namespace.

Implementing CronCommandInterface requires the implementation of the getDefaultDefinition() method. It returns the crontab compatible description of when the command should be executed. For example, if a command should run every day five minutes after midnight, the appropriate value is 5 0 * * *.

 1// src/Acme/DemoBundle/Command/DemoCommand.php
 2namespace Acme\DemoBundle\Command;
 3
 4use Oro\Bundle\CronBundle\Command\CronCommandInterface;
 5use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputInterface;
 6use Symfony\Component\Console\Output\OutputInterface;
 7
 8class DemoCommand implements CronCommandInterface
 9{
10    /** @var string */
11    protected static $defaultName = 'oro:cron:demo';
12
13    public function getDefaultDefinition()
14    {
15        return '5 0 * * *';
16    }
17
18
19    protected function configure()
20    {
21        // ...
22    }
23
24    protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output)
25    {
26        // ...
27    }
28}

Synchronous Cron Commands

By default, all Cron commands are executed asynchronously by sending a message to the queue.

Sometimes it is necessary to execute a Cron command immediately when Cron triggers it, without sending the message to the queue.

To do this, a Cron command should implement the SynchronousCommandInterface interface. In this case, the command will be executed as a background process.

Note

Please note that the synchronous commands must be designed well-performed and should not block process execution as it may affect scheduled execution of other commands.

Scheduling Cron Commands in DB

After creating the Cron commands classes, run the oro:cron:definitions:load command to schedule the created command in the DB. After that, the Cron command will be ready to evaluate and execute it during the next oro:cron command tick.

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