best practice how to schedule symfony2 action [closed]

Question

My application based on symfony2 has to do some standalone jobs at differents moments and differents frequencies. For exemple, sending newsletter, editing report ...

I want to be able to add/edit each task from the application My task would be very close to cron jobs and will consist to call a specific url.

From my point of view :

I think about creating a cron job that launch a script every half hour, or ten minutes. this script only do a curl command witch get a docronjob action. This docronjobaction is inside symfony and is responsible to get all the task and launch the one it has to.

My questions are :

• Is there a cleaner way to achive that ?
• Inside the docronaction how do I launch others action ?
• How do I manage to set the time limit to 0 for an entire controller ?
• Does a bundle doing this allready exist ?

Answer 1

It sounds you are storing your schedule of tasks in the database. No problem. For every different type of task (eg. sending newsletter, save reports) create a service, which does the task. Then add to this services a tag (like twig.extension, but your own), so you have something like a TaskChain, which knows all the tasks.

For executing create a console command, which retrieves the schedule from the database, loads the TaskChain, and executes the tasks. This console command can be simply called from a cronjob without exposing it to the web. In fact your are calling this command via the php-cli and not from a browser, the standard time limit is unlimited. No controllers should be involved for executing.

This should be all organized in an extra TaskBundle.

Answer 2

You can use this blog in order to do what you want. You could then use cron or someother program to trigger the action.

In summary:

First of all, you need to create a symfony command that executes the functionality that you wish. For that, create a folder named "Command" in our Bundle at the same level that we have "Controller or Resources" and put a name in our class. The name has to end with "Command" or it won't work. Let's call it "MyCommand".

    <?php
    namespace Devvness\DevvnessBundle\Command;

    use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Command\ContainerAwareCommand;
    use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputArgument;
    use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputInterface;
    use Symfony\Component\Console\Output\OutputInterface;

    class MyCommand extends ContainerAwareCommand
    {


 protected function configure()
    {
        $this->setName('devvness:my_command')
            ->setDescription('Descripción de lo que hace el comando')
            ->addArgument('my_argument', InputArgument::OPTIONAL, 'Explicamos el significado del argumento');
    }

    protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output)
    {
        $em = $this->getContainer()->get('doctrine')->getManager();
        // Hacemos lo que sea
        $output->writeln('Hola mundo');
        $em->flush();
    }
}

Then you can call it by executing on cmd or console:

php app/console devness:mycommand 

or

php app/console devness:mycommand --my_argument=valor

Then you need to scheduled the task with cron for Unix or something like that by editing the cron file

* * * * * php /root/absolute/for/symfony/project/app/console devness:mycommand --myargument=valor

Answer 3

I had very similar needs (that's why i found this old topic) while working on an application with a lot of commands to manage.

I finally made my own bundle to manage execution and queuing of mutiple symfony command (scheduled tasks stored via Doctrine).

Here is the Git repository : CommandSchedulerBundle

I hope it will help someone.

Best regards