Running CakePHP Shells on Background

Question

Is it possible for CakePHP to execute a cakephp shell task on background for i.e running long reports. I would also want to update the current status back to the user via updating a table during the report generation and querying using Ajax.

Answer 1

Yes, you can run shells in the background via normal system calls like

/path/to/cake/console/cake -app /path/to/app/ <shell> <task>

The tricky part is to start one asynchronously from PHP; the best option would be to put jobs in a queue and run the shell as a cron job every so often, which then processes the queue. You can then also update the status of the job in the queue and poll that information via AJAX.