Configuring Cron Jobs

Study Notes

Configuring Cron Jobs in Commerce

Commerce features require at least one cron job to schedule activities in the future.
Cron jobs are scheduled using a crontab, a file that contains instructions for the cron daemon to run specific commands at set times and dates.

Understanding Crontab

Each user has their own crontab, and commands are executed as the user who owns it.
The crontab is the configuration used to run cron jobs.
Commerce uses cron tasks that can run with different configurations.

Creating and Removing Commerce Crontab

Starting with version 2.2, Commerce creates a crontab for you.
The Commerce crontab is added to any configured crontab for the Commerce file system owner.
To create the Commerce crontab, use the --force option to rewrite an existing crontab.
To remove the Commerce crontab, do so only before uninstalling the Commerce application.

Running Cron Jobs

Run cron jobs from the command line using the cron command.
Command options include --group to specify the cron group to run.
To run the indexing cron job, use the cron:run --group=index command.
To run the default cron job, use the cron:run command.

Logging Cron Job Information

Cron job information has moved from system.log to a separate cron.log.
The cron information can be found at /var/log/cron.log.
All exceptions from cron jobs are logged by \Magento\Cron\Observer\ProcessCronQueueObserver::execute.

Customizing Crontabs and Cron Groups

Custom modules can set up crontabs and optionally cron groups for scheduling tasks.
A crontab is a cron job configuration, and a cron group is a logical group that enables running cron jobs independently.
To configure a cron group, create a crontab.xml file in your module directory.

Description

Learn how to configure cron jobs, which schedule tasks to be performed in the future. Understand how UNIX systems use crontabs to execute commands as a particular user. Test your knowledge of cron job configuration and its applications.