Running a PHP script as a CRON job on Linux

dlgilbert

I have a small PHP script that I want to run periodically on my Linux server, but have yet to figure out how to do it.

The script has no terminal output. It simply updates a database with the status of some specified websites (it's a site monitor). I want to run it every 10 minutes or so, but if I use Lynx, the browser stays resident in memory instead of exiting once the script is done. When it runs again, another instance loads in memory. Not a good plan for something that will run every 10 minutes.

So... is this something drop dead simple that I'm just missing or is there a funky trick to it?

Thanks in advance!

yelvington

The short answer is to use "lynx -dump http://www.whatever.com/path/script.php", but that might not be the best way to do it.

If you have php compiled as an executable binary, separate from the Web server, you can invoke it directly

php -q /path/to/script.php

or, in the script itself

#!/usr/bin/php -q

<? echo "hello, world";
?>
The biggest advantage of using PHP directly is that you do NOT put the script on the Web server. That has obvious security implications.

trooper

Just to support Yelvington in what he said

In the past i've had to run php scripts as cron jobs. I simply added the lynx -d command to the crontab file and ensured that the php script could be run as a standalone script.

By that i mean that it had all the database conenctions etc in the code rather than relying on "included" files.

Now i'm not 100% sure if that was the best way to do it but as the php script was outside the webroot i didn't experience any problems

thom

you could also just use:

'wget -qO /dev/null http://url-to-file'

assuming you have wget installed on your machine. This would fetch your script and "save" it to /dev/null . The q switch makes things silent and O specifies output file.