Job Administration System

TIP: The use of this control panel is completely optional and jobs can still be scheduled from your system's job scheduler. The intention is to schedule the forum's cron.php once during setup. After that various tasks can be scheduled, de-scheduled and managed via the forum's ACP.

The Job Manager admin control panel can be used to schedule or run ad hoc tasks like taking backups, running consistency checks, generating sitemaps, importing messages from a mailing list, USENET groups or XML Feeds. It can also be used to view output log files.

This control panel was introduced with FUDforum 3.0.0. The scheduling capability was added in FUDforum 3.0.2.

Scheduling cron.php

For scheduling to work you need to configure your system's job scheduler (cron) to run cron.php repeatedly (say, for example every 1 minute). After that, you can schedule tasks from this control panel.

Cron.php is located in the forum's script/ directory. It is preferred to call cron.php via URL, typically index.php?t=cron (as it will run with the web server's permissions). You can also use a remote cron service like Easycron.com, webcron.org, CronLess or WebBasedCron.

Typical crontab entry to run the forum's cron.php scrip every minute on Linux and Unix servers:

* * * * * /usr/bin/wget http://your.site.com/forum/index.php?t=cron >/tmp/cron.out 2>&1

Job settings

PHP CLI Executable

Full path to the command line PHP executable on your system. This command will be used to run periodic and ad hoc tasks.

Linux/Unix users can check where the PHP CLI is located on their systems with:

$ which php
/usr/bin/php

WARNING: If you run your web server in a chroot jail, the forum will not be able to see the PHP executable, even if you specify its correct location.

Add/Edit Job Schedule

Job

Select the task you want to schedule from the list of available values.

Note: If you add mailing list, newsgroup or XML Aggregation rules, they will appear in the drop down as jobs.

Minute

Minute(s) when the job should run. Multiple values should be comma separated.

For example:

• enter * to run on every minute.
• enter */2 to run it every 2 minutes (requires FUDforum 3.0.3 or higher)
• enter 0,15,30,45 to run it on minutes 0, 15, 30 and 45.

Hour

Hour(s) when the job should run.

Day of month

Day of the month when the job should run.

Month

Month(s) when the job should run.

Day of week

Day(s) of the week the job should run.

Status

Job status. Either enabled or disabled.

Disable jobs to prevent cron.php from running them. You can still, however, run them manually. Handy for ad-hoc tasks.

Scheduled jobs

List of scheduled jobs with controls to Edit, Delete, Run Now or View the job's output log. The Run Now button will only be available if the PHP CLI Executable (see above) is set.