This SilverStripe module provides developers the possibility to define tasks that can be triggered by cron jobs or other time based scripts.

Add the following to your project's composer.json:

{
	"require": {
		"silverstripe/crontask": "*"
	}
}

Run composer update (this will also install needed 3rd party libs in ./vendor)

Implement the CronTask interface on a new or already existing class:

class TestCron implements CronTask {

	/**
	 * 
	 * @return string
	 */
	public function getSchedule() {
		return "5 * * * *";
	}

	/**
	 * 
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function process() {
		echo 'hello';
	}
}

Then execute the crontask controller by sake

./framework/sake dev/cron

Note: Run ./framework/sake dev/cron flush=1 to make SilverStripe aware of your new class.

The crontask controller expects that the getSchedule returns a string as a cron expression.

Some examples:

• * * * * * - every time
• */5 * * * * - every five minute (00:05, 00:10, 00:15 etc)
• 0 1 * * * - every day at 01:00
• 0 0 2 * * - the 2nd of every month at 00:00
• 0 0 0 ? 1/2 FRI#2 * - Every second Friday of every other month at 00:00

The process method might have some of the logic it in, or setup and execute other more complicated background processes.

Observe that the crontask module don't scheduling. This means if the total time of all process calls takes more than one minute, it might start another process that interferes with the previously running process.

Code that mimics Ouroboros is often a bad idea.

A CRON expression is a string representing the schedule for a particular command to execute. The parts of a CRON schedule are as follows:

*    *    *    *    *    *
-    -    -    -    -    -
|    |    |    |    |    |
|    |    |    |    |    + year [optional]
|    |    |    |    +----- day of week (0 - 7) (Sunday=0 or 7)
|    |    |    +---------- month (1 - 12)
|    |    +--------------- day of month (1 - 31)
|    +-------------------- hour (0 - 23)
+------------------------- min (0 - 59)

For more information about what cron expression is allowed, see the Cron-Expression post from the creator of the 3rd party library.

Thanks to Michael Dowling for doing the actual job of parsing cron expressions.

This module is just a thin wrapper around his code.