How to run a CodeIgniter file through CRON?

Question

I've tried the following method in the past:

<?php
set_time_limit(0);
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = 'cron/controller/index';
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = 'cron/controller/index';
require_once('index.php');
?>

and putting this in a file in the codeigniter installation directory, calling it cron.php, and then invoking it via:

php /home/[username]/public_html/my_project/cron.php

If I type the URL to cron.php in my browser it works perfectly, however whenever its run via CRON I get a 404 error. Putting the following code in the show_404() function of CodeIgniter

function show_404($page = '')
{
   print_r($_SERVER);
   echo "\n\n";
   die ($page);
}

results in getting the following output emailed to me:

Array
(
   [SHELL] => /bin/sh
   [MAILTO] => [email protected]
   [USER] => [me]
   [PATH] => /usr/bin:/bin
   [PWD] => /home/[me]
   [SHLVL] => 1
   [HOME] => /home/[me]
   [LOGNAME] => [me]
   [_] => /usr/bin/php
   [PHP_SELF] =>
   [REQUEST_TIME] => 1266479641
   [argv] => Array
       (
           [0] => /home/[me]/public_html/my_project/cron.php
       )

   [argc] => 1
   [PATH_INFO] => cron/controller/index
   [REQUEST_URI] => cron/controllers/index
)


home/[me]

Here I've [me] in place of my actual username.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The simplest way to run a cron via CodeIgniter is to make a cron URL available via your app.

Then call it via wget

wget -O - -q -t 1 http://www.example.com/cron/run

Inside the controller you can then use a log to ensure the cron is not run too often i.e. if the Google robots trigger it by mistake.

A second method would be to use lynx

/usr/local/bin/lynx -source http://www.example.com/cron/run

Answer 2

There is a wiki article about how to run CodeIgniter on the command line, but this is more useful for applications that need to interact with the user through terminal (there's a library for that too).

http://codeigniter.com/wiki/CI_on_the_command_line/

One benefit of doing it this way over using wget is you can protect your code from being run by users or bots with:

if(!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']))
{
     show_error('Shove off hax0r!');
}

Answer 3

If you want to run cron job by running url, here is a great article

http://www.nbill.co.uk/documentation/setting-up-a-cronjob.html