Create and Schedule Cron Jobs in DirectAdmin

What is a cron job?

A cron job is like an alarm clock for your website. When the time comes, it runs a command or a script (a small program) by itself. People use cron jobs to clear old files, send reports or run a website's regular tasks.

Understand the time boxes

DirectAdmin gives you five boxes for the time. Each one is a part of the schedule.

Box	What it means	Allowed values
Minute	Minute of the hour	0 to 59
Hour	Hour of the day	0 to 23
Day of month	Date in the month	1 to 31
Month	Month of the year	1 to 12
Day of week	Weekday	0 to 7 (0 and 7 mean Sunday)

A star * means "every". So 30 2 * * * means every day at 2:30 in the morning.

Steps

Log in to DirectAdmin.
Open Advanced Features and click Cron Jobs.
Click Create Cron Job, or find the form on the page.
Fill in the five time boxes.
In the Command box, type what should run. Example:

php /home/username/domains/example.com/public_html/task.php

This line runs a PHP file. Replace username, the domain and the file name with your own.

Click Create.

Edit or delete a cron job

Go back to Cron Jobs. Use the edit link beside a job to change it, or the delete link to remove it. Warning: a wrong command can break a site, so test it carefully.

Get emails about results

Some versions have a box for an email address. The server sends the output of each run there. This helps you see if a job fails. Add > /dev/null 2>&1 at the end of the command to stop these emails.

Tip: Do not run a job every minute unless you really need it. Too many jobs slow your hosting down.

Quick recap

A cron job runs a command on a schedule.
Open Advanced Features, then Cron Jobs.
Set minute, hour, day, month and weekday, then add the command.
A star means "every".
Test your command before relying on it.