Drupal Tutorial - Setting up Drupal automated tasks

 

 

Setting up automation with Drupal is quite important, in order to keep your software and its plugins up to date. It is utilized using a crontab job. Generally, cron is an UNIX utility for scheduling jobs to be executed sometime in the future. A cron is normally used to schedule a job that is executed periodically - for example, to send out a notice every morning or, in your case, to check for updates. It is also a daemon process, meaning that it runs continuously, waiting for specific events to occur and the time, a certain job to be execute, to come.

 

In order to enable Drupal's automation, you should set a crontab job, which will "call" a certain file, which itself will "tell" your Drupal installation to perform some periodic tasks. This is highly recommended and almost obligatory, in order to make sure that your system is running smoothly.

 

The advised by Drupal crontab job syntax is:

 

45 * * * * /usr/bin/lynx -source http://example.com/cron.php

 

or

 

45 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q http://example.com/cron.php

 

Note that you will have to substitute "example.com" with the location, where your Drupal is installed. If you access it through "mywebsite.com", just substitute "example.com" with "mywebsite.com", but if you access it through "mywebsite.com/something", just substitute "example.com" with "mywebsite.com/something".

 

Once you prepare the crontab job to match your domain name, you should login in your hosting cPanel.

 

There you should find the "Cron jobs" icon and click on it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When asked for the type of editing, you will have to choose "Advanced (Unix Style)":

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clicking on it will take you to the following screen:

 

 

 

 

where you will have to fill the boxes as shown in the screenshot, by simply rewriting the crontab job advised above. When you are done, simply click the "Commit changes" button:

 

 

 

 

 

and you are done. Drupal's automation should have been properly set.

 

 

	Back to Drupal tutorials and modules