Cron jobs#

Cron jobs are available from the Cron Jobs view in the Control Panel. Note that cron jobs are not available on all Divio application plans.

'Cron job management'

Creating tasks#

When adding a cron job, you need to provide the command that will be executed, and the period according to which the task should be run.

For example, if you select every 10 minutes, the task will be run every hour at :10, :20, :30, :40, :50 and :00.

A cron job can execute a simple command (for example: /usr/local/bin/python manage.py cms fix_tree) or a script.

If you would like to run a task at longer intervals, you can set the cron job execution time to daily and restrict the execution using a script.

For example, if you would like to <execute a command> every Thursday (4th day of the week), the script could look like this

sh -c 'if [ $(date +%u) -eq 4 ]; then <execute a command>; fi'

or if you would like to <execute a command> every 5th day of the month, the script could look as follows.

sh -c 'if [ $(date +%d) -eq 5 ]; then <execute a command>; fi'

After adding or changing a cron job, the environment will need to be redeployed for the cron configuration to be applied.

Cron commands#

Cron does not provide a fully-fledged environment - it’s not a bash environment, for example, and commands that include bash syntax will not work. It can only execute commands.

Moreover, to avoid ambiguity and expected results, it is wise to be explicit. For example, in the Python example above, we specified the full Python path:

/usr/local/bin/python

Cron job timeouts#

We apply a default timeout of ten minutes on processes started by cron jobs. Longer-running processes should be handled by a more appropriate task manager (such as Celery) instead.

Logging#

Cron jobs emit their own logs:

'Cron job logs'