How can I set a PHP script to run on a schedule? I don't have full control over the server as I am using a hosting company, I have a PLESK administration for the hosting though.
Thanks
I believe PLESK has a crontab area underneath each domain.
Alternatively, if you have shell access, here's a good tutorial on editing your crontab from the command-line.
crontab. video tutorial here:
http://www.webhostingresourcekit.com/flash/plesk-8-linux/plesk8linux_crontab.html
What you're looking for is called a cron job: an automated task that can execute a http request on your server.
Since you're hosted, it's impossible to manually set up a cron job to run. However, many web hosts offer online tools for creating cron jobs through their control panel (cpanel, plesk, etc).
If that isn't an option, there are some paid and SOME free cron services you might be able to find if you poke around long enough.
Related
I had to configure AppDynamics alerts in the past for Java applications I worked for.
I also heard of Nagios, but I am not very sure how that works.
Now, I need to configure alerts for a FlowForce Server, but I don't believe it can be integrated with AppDynamics or Nagios.
I saw FlowForce allow me to send some alerts, like when a step of a job fails, but I would like to have some server alerts, like, for instance, if the license expires and, as a result, the server is automatically shut down.
I am wondering the best way to achieve it.
I am running it on a Windows environment BTW.
Suggestions are welcome.
Thank you in advance!
I found my answer on the Flow Force online help (https://manual.altova.com/flowforceserver/flowforceserver/)
The Flow Force is deployed as two servers, which in a window env, can be started and stopped as windows services (can be found via "Control Panel">"Administrative Tools">Services). With this information, I can monitor them via NAGIOS.
Ok I am attempting to transfer a manual change to powershell,
Attempting to grant IIS_IUSRS access to /LM/SmtpSvc/ and /LM/SmtpSvc/1/ nodes in the IIS Metabase.
I have googled extensively and can not find an example of what i am looking for.
I have been trying to play with
$smtp = [wmiclass]‘root\MicrosoftIISv2:IIsSmtpServerSetting'
But I am in a little over my head with WMI.
Any help would be appreciated. This setting is required for resolving
This.
Not an exact answer, but the best I have so far. Following the Guide here I chose option 1 and changed the app pool to network service. I will still work on a way to do the permissions settings with powershell.
Update (solution untested)
I found this answer on another post that details how to do it using scripts in the iis6.0 resource toolkit. To get these scripts on server 2012 you have to install the IIS6.0 resource toolkit, the only way i can find to do a silent install of this one was located here from there you can call the scripts using cscript.exe. I stuck with the changing user on the app pool option because it fits in with other things as well.
How can I create a mongodb procedure that can be scheduled to run once every day, at a fix time, say sharp at midnight GMT?
This google group link says you cannot schedule a task in mongoDB, they have a Jira for this, but you can use Window Task Scheduler which is described in this link. Is this the only way to achieve it? Is this a good way to do it?
Quoting the comment by #Markus,
As written in a different answer, running MongoDB on Windows is a bad idea for various reasons. Under Linux, you could use crond to run a .js file easily. If your requirement is to run MongoDB and have a reliable scheduler, the right tool for the job is Linux.
This answer also mentions the way to solve this.
This is done on Windows the same way you do on Linux.
ONE: Make a script in JavaScript to manage the task. This can be done in other languages if you prefer. This is a JavaScript script to rotate logs.
use admin
db.runCommand( { logRotate : 1 } )
TWO: Create a task in Task Scheduler to run the script. This can be done with the GUI, the API, or in XML. I usually set it up in the GUI and export the XML to allow parameterization of the database server, password, port, and user.
THREE: Include the execution of the script in the task
$MONGO_HOME/Mongo localhost:27017 -u myMongoServiceAccount -p somepassword LogRotate.js
The same concept can be applied to index management, gathering database stats, or managing stale locks.
I came across the "--delete-after" option when I was reading the manpage of wget ?
what's the purpose of providing such an option ? Is it just for testing the page is ok for downloading ? Or maybe there are other situations where this option is useful, I hope you guys may give me some hints.
With reference to your comments above. I'm providing some examples of how we use it. We have a few websites running on Rackspace Cloud Sites which is a managed cloud hosting solution. We don't have access to regular cron.
We had an issue with runaway usage on a site using WordPress because WP kept calling wp-cron.php. To give you a sense of runaway usage, it used up in one day the allotted CPU cycles for a month. Anyway what I did was disable wp-cron.php being called within the WordPress system and manually call it through wget. I'm not interested in the output from the process so if I don't use --delete-after with wget (wget ... > /dev/null 2>&1 works well too) the folder where wget runs would get filled with hundreds of useless logs and output of each time the script was called.
We also have SugarCRM installed and that system requires its cron script to be called to handle system maintenance. We use wget silently for that as well. Basically a lot of these kinds of web-based systems have cron scripts. If you can't call your scripts directly say using php on the machine then the other option is calling it silently with wget.
The command to call these cron scripts is quite basic - wget --delete-after http://example.com/cron.php?parameters=if+needed
I'm using wget (with cron) to automate commands to a web application, so I have no interest in the contents of the pages. --delete-after is ideal for this.
You can use it for testing if a page is downloading ok, but usually it's used to force proxy servers to cache their contents.
If your sitting on a connection where there's a network appliance caching content between the site and your endpoint, and you have a site that's popular among users on that network, then what you may want to do as a sysadmin, is to use a down level machine just after the proxy to script a recursive "-r" or mirror "-m" wget operation.
The proxy appliance will see this and pre-cache the site and it's assets, thus making site accesses for uses after said proxy a bit faster.
You'd then want to specify "--delete-after" to free up the disk space used unless your wanting to keep a local copy of all sites you force to cache.
Sometimes you only need to visit a website to set an IP address - say if you are rolling your own dyn dns service.
What are the different approaches for creating scheduled tasks for web applications, with or without a separate web/desktop application?
If we're talking Microsoft platform, then I'd always develop a separate Windows Service to handle such batch tasks.
You can always reference the same assemblies that are being used by your web application to avoid any nasty code duplication.
Jeff discussed this on the Stack Overflow blog -
https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/easy-background-tasks-in-aspnet/
Basically, Jeff proposed using the CacheItemRemovedCallback as a timer for calling certain tasks.
I personally believe that automated tasks should be handled as a service, a Windows scheduled task, or a job in SQL Server.
Under Linux, checkout cron.
I think Stack Overflow itself is using an ApplicationCache expiration to run background code at intervals.
If you're on a Linux host, you'll almost certainly be using cron.
Under linux you can use cron jobs (http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbie/unix/cron-1.html) to schedule tasks.
Use URL fetchers like wget or curl to make HTTP GET requests.
Secure your URLs with authentication so that no one can execute the tasks without knowing the user/password.
I think Windows' built-in Task Scheduler is the suggested tool for this job. That requires an outside application.
This may or may not be what you're looking for, but read this article, "Simulate a Windows Service using ASP.NET to run scheduled jobs". I think StackOverflow may use this method or it was at least talked about using it.
A very simple method that we've used where I work is this:
Set up a webservice/web method that executes the task. This webservice can be secured with username/pass if desired.
Create a console app that calls this web service. If desired, you can have the console app send parameters and/or get back some sort of metrics for output to the console or external logging.
Schedule this executable in the task scheduler of choice.
It's not pretty, but it is simple and reliable. Since the console app is essentially just a heartbeat to tell the app to go do its work, it does not need to share any libraries with the application. Another plus of this methodology is that it's fairly trivial to kick off manually when needed.
Use URL fetchers like wget or curl to make HTTP GET requests.
Secure your URLs with authentication so that no one can execute the tasks without knowing the user/password.
You can also tell cron to run php scripts directly, for example. And you can set the permissions on the PHP file to prevent other people accessing them or better yet, don't have these utility scripts in a web accessible directory...
Java and Spring -- Use quartz. Very nice and reliable -- http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/1.2.x/reference/scheduling.html
I think there are easier ways than using cron (Linux) or Task Scheduler (Windows). You can build this into your web-app using:
(a) quartz scheduler,
or if you don't want to integrate another 3rd party library into your application:
(b) create a thread on startup which uses the standard Java 'java.util.Timer' class to run your tasks.
I recently worked on a project that does exactly this (obviously it is an external service but I thought I would share).
https://anticipated.io/
You can receive a webhook or an SQS event at a specific scheduled time. Dealing with these schedulers can be a pain so I thought I'd share in such case someone is looking to offload their concerns.