Help getting first web2py Cron Task working

Question

I'm running web2py locally with Windows 7 and live on a Linux Ubuntu server and I haven't been able to get my cron job to run in either.

My crontab looks like this:

*/1 * * * * root *autoemail/send_autoemails 

and my function works fine when called manually. It also ends with

db.commit()

Other than that I don't know what else to do get it working although I really didn't understand all of the web2py book section on Cron, specifically when it came to soft/hard/external cron and all of that.

I saw a web2py thread that perhaps cron was going to be replaced?

Perhaps that has something to do with this? Is there something else I need to do to configure cron before it will work?

Any ideas about how I can troubleshoot this are greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

On this moment web2py is changing from Cron to Scheduler, with newer web2py versions Cron is disabled by default.

You can use your function with the Scheduler, putting it into a model file and passing it to the scheduler creator class, in order to enable a new Scheduler instance with it:

# New File applications/yourapp/models/zfunctions.py
#
def send_autoemails():
    ...
    ...#Your code here
    ...
    ...

from gluon.scheduler import Scheduler
Scheduler(db,dict(yourfunction=send_autoemails)) 

After that you can add a new job simply from the web2py db admin interface, under db.task_scheduled you must click on insert new task_scheduled and set period to run, repeats, timeouts, enable, disable, etc....
Here are some info about it: http://web2py.com/book/default/chapter/04#Scheduler-(experimental)