TutsPlus.com has posted the latest tutorial in their "Programming with Yii2" series showing you how to work with cron services to periodically run scripts in your application.

In this Programming With Yii2 series, I'm guiding readers in use of the Yii2 Framework for PHP. In today's tutorial, I'll share with you how to take advantage of Yii's console capacity to run cron jobs.

In the past, I've used wget in my cron jobs—a web accessible URL would run my background tasks. This raised security issues and has some performance problems. While I addressed some ways to mitigate risks in our startup series' episodes on security, I had hoped to transition to console-driven commands. And with Yii2 it's fairly straightforward.

He starts with a brief look at what a "cron" is for those that may not be familiar and how it works on linux-based systems. He then gets into the use of console "cron" commands using the Yii2 framework's own functionality to create a "cron controller" that performs Twitter operations on "frequent", "quarter" and hourly measurements. He shows how to update the crontab file to call the commands instead of making the web requests. He ends this tutorial with an issue to consider regarding different namespaces when using the commands versus web requests.