Running Laravel Task at specific time

Question

I've seen some similar questions at SO but none of then have answered me. I had never heard of CRON before and I'm new to Laravel. What I need is to run a Task once a week to perform some actions on my database (MySql), say every sunday at 12:00 am. How could I achieve this goal?

Answer 1

If you can use cron, you just have to execute

crontab -e

Or, if you need to run as root:

sudo crontab -e

This will open a text editor so you can modify your crontab and there you'll have one line for each scheduled command, as this one:

1 0 * * *  php /var/www/myBlog/artisan task:run

The command in this like will be executed at the first minute of every day (0h01 or 12h01am).

Here is the explanation of it all:

*    *    *    *    *  <command to execute>
┬    ┬    ┬    ┬    ┬
│    │    │    │    │
│    │    │    │    │
│    │    │    │    └───── day of week (0 - 6) (0 to 6 are Sunday to Saturday, or use names)
│    │    │    └────────── month (1 - 12)
│    │    └─────────────── day of month (1 - 31)
│    └──────────────────── hour (0 - 23)
└───────────────────────── min (0 - 59)

So, in your case, you'll create a line like this:

0    12    *    *    0  <command to execute>

But how do you do that for a task in Laravel? There are many ways, one of them is in my first example: create an artisan command (task:run) and then just run artisan, or you can just create a route in your app to that will call your task every time it is hit:

Route::get('/task/run',array('uses'=>'TaskController@run'));

And then you just have to add it your crontab, but you'll need something to hit your url, like wget or curl:

0  12  *  *  0  curl http://mysite.com/run/task

Answer 2

Since Laravel 5, the only entry you need to put into crontab after executing crontab -e is

* * * * * php /path/to/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

Do remember to change /path/to/artisan part to your project specific path.

And then you can define your scheduled tasks and running frequency in Laravel's App\Console\Kernel class. See Laravel documentation for more information: Task Schedule