Wednesday, February 17, 2010

How to group cron jobs

With SetCronJob, you can group your cron jobs easily with Grouping feature. It's very useful when you need to create a lot of cron jobs.

- How to create a new group.
Click on Add a group, enter group name and press enter. Your group will be created.

- How to create new cron jobs under a group.
Click on Create new cron jobs, choose group name in list Group of new cron job, then click Save.

- How to move existing cron jobs to a group.
Click on Edit icon, choose group name in list Group of this cron job, then click Save.

- How to ungroup a cron job.
Click on Edit icon, choose None in Group of this cron job, then click Save.

- How to rename a group.
Click on Edit icon of the group name, enter new group name and press enter.

- How to delete a group.
Click on Delete icon. This will delete the group only, and will NOT delete cron jobs under that group.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Why your cron job doesn't execute

If you set up your cron, and it looks like the cron doesn't execute, here are some reason and how to solve:

- You set wrong time setting

Sometimes people asked me why their cron jobs don’t execute, or execute only one time. When I checked the cron setting, I saw that they set Hour or Day field to "1", and expect it to run every "1" hour/day. The correct time setting to make it run hourly or daily is set the Hour or Day field to "All", and set a specific value for the smaller field: Minute and/or Hour.

You are recommended to create cron job at a predefined interval. Just click on "Create new cron jobs" and see the instructions.

- It's not time to execute.

The value "Every X" means that your cron will be executed when the field is divisible by X. For example, if you set the hour to Every 6, your cron job will be executed at 0, 6, 12, 18 o'clock.

And the time zone of SetCronJob is GMT/UTC, so don't look at your clock or watch, look at the bottom of Control Panel and see what time it is in GMT/UTC.

- The connection/request failed.

You can set the Notify value to Failure, so that you will receive notification when SetCronJob is unable to make a connection and request.

-Your script is deleted / redirected.

If it used to work before, but suddenly stopped work, you should check your script. Try entering the URL into your favorite browser (FireFox, IE, Opera, etc). If it has been deleted, you may see the error HTTP 404 Not Found. If it's redirected to somewhere, e.g. to www or non-www version, try setting cron with destination URL.

- Your cron job is disabled.

Check the Status field of your cron whether it's "Active" or not. If it's disabled, try enabling it by click on Edit icon, then Save icon.

- Your script is executed, but not works.

If your script is executed by my bot (see the logs, or set Notify to Always, or add some sending mail snippet to your script, etc), but it doesn't work and does its jobs, you'd better have a look at your script.

If it's a URL to some cron file created by another script, e.g. CMS (Drupal, Joomla, etc), forums, blog (WP-o-Matic of WordPress, etc), you should re-check its settings, or ask your friends who have experience on that software.

If it's your own script, you can check whether it works correctly when being called from a browser. Try checking whether there's some syntax or logic error.

If your script partially executed, consider tips at Set up cron jobs with PHP script. I'm sure it will help you :)

 

If you are sure your cron script, time setting are ok, but SetCronJob doesn't execute your cron, don't hesitate to contact me.

 

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Are you satisfied with SetCronJob?

Hello all,

Happy new year to you :)

In 2009 and some first days of 2010, SetCronJob had a lot of changes. Most of these changes are to make SetCronJob better, but some of them may be not :D

So, I would like to listen to you.

Are you satisfied with SetCronJob's service?
Which feature are you like/dislike the most?

Click here to fill out my survey!

If there is something you want me to change, let me know :)

Best regards,
Nguyen An Thuan

Monday, January 11, 2010

How to set up cron jobs

With SetCronJob, set up cron jobs is very easy.

After activating your account, you will have two example cron jobs: cron job every day (named "once a day") and cron job every hour (named "every hour").

If you would like to set up your cron jobs to run every day or hour, simply click on its URL, then paste your URL into "URL to call" field, then click on Save button.

If you want to set up cron jobs to run periodically, click on "Create new cron jobs'" link, select an interval at the second rows, enter your URL, then click on Add button.

If you would like to create cron jobs with crontab syntax, click on CRONTAB link at bottom of Control Panel, then edit time fields as desired.

Hope it helps :)