Cal Evans has posted the second part of his series as he works through the installation and configuration of the Mautic PHP-based marketing automation tool. In this part of the series he focuses on cron jobs.

This time we are talking about the cron jobs necessary to make Mautic run. Mautic has several commands that are necessary to execute that are not web based. They are run from the command line manually (dumb idea) or using a scheduler like cron on Linux. As with my “Installing Mautic” post, this post is only interesting to those of you self-hosting Mautic.

There is a great manual page on this titles “Cron Jobs”. It tells you a lot of what I’ll tell you here. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you start there.

He talks about each of the four jobs that, if you're using the system yourself, will want to run often: one for handling segments, two for campaigns and another for sending messages. He also talks about the main problem he ran into during his work with the cron jobs - permissions issues. He shares how he resolved this issue with an extra line in his crontab (after changing the user they ran as) and ends with some extra advice against wide open permissions.

The SitePoint PHP Blog has a new tutorial posted from author Reza Lavaryan showing you how to use the Crunz package to make cronjobs a bit simpler in a more framework-agnostic way.

In this article, we’re going to learn about a relatively new job scheduling library named Crunz. Crunz is a framework-agnostic library inspired by Laravel’s Task Scheduler, but improved in many ways. [...] Before getting started, you should have a firm grasp of cronjobs, so please read our in-depth walkthrough if you’re unfamiliar with how they work.

The tutorial then starts in on the code, getting the library installed and setting up a basic task example. The "task" files are sets of cron-formatted commands that are read and executed much like the cron daemon would on a Unix-based system. Example code for a task and command are included. They also talk about the "frequency" settings allowed by the library and the helper methods to make creating them simpler. The post also includes details about task lifetime, running conditions, configuration and parallelism (among other topics).

On the TNT Studio site they've posted a tutorial showing you how to automate scheduled tasks and output to Slack, the popular online communication tool (think IRC for the web). They show how to use a simple webhook setup to relay the results of a task back to a given channel.

What many of us grow accustomed to is having cron job output emailed to us in order to see if everything went ok. Laravel's task scheduler also supports emailing output of the commands but if you are like millions of developers out there then you are probably using Slack and it's possible that it crossed your mind that it would be great if we could get output of the cron command sent to Slack. So let's do that.

They then walk you through the setup of the Slack notifier class to send the data to Slack via a Guzzle POSTed request. The next portion puts this code to work and creates the code to execute the command and return the results. The "after" event is then used to make the Slack request and output the results to the waiting channel.

If you've ever wanted to learn about cron jobs, how to set them up and what kind of functionality they provide then the SitePoint PHP blog has the post for you. In this comprehensive guide to cron you learn about these topics and more.

There are times when there’s a need for running a group of tasks automatically at certain times in the future. These tasks are usually administrative, but could be anything – from making database backups to downloading emails when everyone is asleep. [...] This article is an in-depth walkthrough of this program, and a reboot of this ancient, but still surprisingly relevant post.

They start by going through some of the basic terminology and syntax, where the cron files live and what a typical file format looks like. Also included are instructions on:

• how to edit the cron correctly (crontab)
• the structure of each cron entry
• how to have it run at the time you want
• editing another user's crontab
• cron permissions
• redirecting output

They also talk about executing PHP in a cron job, how to prevent overlaps with a "lock" file . There's also a mention of Anacron as a replacement for cron and a few helpful hints to help you debug when things go wrong.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted showing you how to use the Laravel "scheduler" to handle cron jobs and the execution of custom commands.

There are times when your application needs to run administrative tasks periodically on the server. Whether you want to send out emails to your users or clean up the database tables at the end of the day, you will need a task scheduling mechanism to take care of the tasks, when it’s time. Cron is a task scheduler in unix-like systems, which runs shell commands at certain intervals.

They start with some of the basics of cron and how is configuration is defined. Since the Laravel scheduler makes use of the same format, they want to be sure everyone is on the same page. Next they show you how to create a custom command in Laravel, a simple script designed to be run on the command line. The tutorial shows how to execute the simple command and how to add it to your application's "commands" list in the configuration. Finally they get to scheduling the commands, defining a schedule method and using the Laravel helper methods to set the execution time to something like "daily", "hourly" or, if you need something a bit more custom, a full cron-formatted string. The post ends with the addition of the Laravel scheduler execution to the system cron, set to run every minute.

New on NetTuts.com there's a tutorial about using cron with PHP and how to manage the jobs your server currently runs.

The cronTab, or “Cron Table”, is a Linux system process / daemon which facilitates the scheduling of repetitive tasks thereby easing up our day to day routine. In this tutorial, we’ll create a dynamic PHP class that, using a secure connection, provides us with a means to manipulate the cronTab!

They explain the cron format (time and script to run) and how to set up a crontab management class that uses the ssh extension for PHP to communicate with the remote server. Their class includes methods for setting up jobs, writing them out to the cron file, removing existing jobs and dropping the entire cron file at once.