Learn to run PHP Scripts from Cron jobs

With the help of the program Cron, you may plan your work so that it will eventually execute automatically. It is essentially a background software that may be scheduled (time-based) using web hosts’ cPanel or commands. These orders are nothing more than the so-called “Cron Jobs,” which are jobs or duties. Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, and other Unix-like operating systems can also use Cron.

Running PHP scripts from Cron jobs.

Running PHP scripts from a cron job using a command-line program such as curl or wget is a common way.
For example : a cron job runs a command like

curl http://example.com/script.php

where, curl accesses the web page, which then runs the PHP script.

However, you can also run the script directly by using the PHP command-line interpreter. This is also an effective and faster method to run PHP scripts on our website from cron jobs.

Let’s see a command that shows how to run a script using the PHP command-line interpreter :

php -q /home/username/public_html/script.php

In this above example, the PHP command-line interpreter runs the script.php file.
The -q option is responsible to enable quiet mode which prevents HTTP headers from being displayed.

Your PHP script can run correctly only when it is called from a specific directory that depends on the code in your PHP script.
For example, if the script has to use relative paths to include files, then it will only run when it is called from the correct directory. A command for how to call a PHP script from a specific directory is :

cd /home/username/public_html/; php -q script.php

For the special configuration options in your script, you can use a custom php.ini.file like the example shown below :

php -c /home/username/php.ini /home/username/public_html/script.php

Here, -c option allows you to call a php script using a custom php.ini file.

This is all about how you can run PHP script from cron jobs.

Also Read

Point Your Domain to a ‘Coming soon’ Page In Simple Steps

How to Permanently Delete All Email from Inbox in Webmail?

Ideas To Fix Corrupted Tables in MySQL