Setting up cron task in Plesk 11

Question

I'm trying to setup a cron task in Plesk to run a short script every 5 minutes, I've just moved from a managed hosting account to a full access Plesk VPS, and I'm a little lost on a couple of things, this one in particular, when I go to Server > Scheduled Tasks I get a list of 'system users' as below, but I'm not sure under which user to make the cron task, any ideas?

• adm
• apache
• bin
• daemon
• ftp
• games
• gopher
• .. going all the way down to webalizer

The cron script path is below if that's relevant as to which user to choose -

/var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/httpdocs/scripts/index.php

Answer 1

If you are going to create subscription-level task, than you can create cron/windows scheduler task in:

"Subscriptions" > your subscription > "Websites & domains" > click on "Show advanced operations" > "Scheduled Tasks" > there will be only one name of FTP user of your subscription.

^{Note: Pay attention to interface changes for Plesk 11.5 and Plesk 12+ - there is no need to open "Show advanced operations".}

The latest Plesk 12.5 provide a lot of options to cover most of the task cases:

Plesk 12.5

Other Plesk versions support only "Run a command" option:

Plesk 12.0

Plesk 11.5

If you need just answer, in "Server" -> "Scheduled Tasks" you can choose:

• FTP user of your subscription mysite.com

• your can choose root, but it's not recommended for security reasons.

For Plesk version below 12.5 to schedule execution of PHP script on Windows there is two ways:

1. Direct call of php binary with your script as argument.

   Path to executable file: C:\Program Files (x86)\Parallels\Parallels Panel\Additional\PleskPHP55\php.exe

   Arguments: path to you script like C:\inetpub\vhosts\domain.tld\httpdocs\script.php

   ^{Note: Pay attention to interpretation path, ...Additional\PleskPHP55\php.exe it path for PHP 5.5, you can change PleskPHP55 to PleskPHP5, PleskPHP53 or PleskPHP54 to use another PHP version.}

2. Call script via request to your site:

   Path to executable file: C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe

   Arguments: -c "(new-object system.net.webclient).downloadstring('http://domain.test/script.aspx')"