A Cron Job in Laravel 4

Question

I need a Cron job for execute a Scraper to a Website and send emails with the information, I made a Controller to do that, but when I set up the command to run that file

php app/controllers/ScraperController.php 

I get this error

PHP Fatal error: Class 'BaseController' not found in /var/www/U-Scraper/app/controllers/ScraperController.php on line 2

The thing is, it works when I set up with a route to that controller

Solution 1

Controllers don't run by themselves, they work as a component of Laravel. If you're loading your controller directly then Laravel is not being loaded and as far as PHP is concerned BaseController, as well as Laravel's Controller class, does not exist. Normally your web server loads public/index.php which loads Laravel and so on. If that's confusing you may want to learn about how autoloading with Composer works: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/easy-package-management-with-composer/

What you should do is write an Artisan command that does what you need and call that command using cron. This question gives details on how to accomplish this: Cron Job in Laravel

Solution 2

I suggest you to create new Artisan command instead of controller.

Then set CRON task to run your command, for example:

1 * * * * /usr/bin/php /path/to/the/artisan nameofthecustomcommand

If you cannot run/set task this way, but you can set the URL to execute

http://mydomain.com/cron.php

// cron.php
// I am aware I do use exec()
exec('php artisan nameofthecustomcommand');

More about Artisan commands here

There is a chance, you can put whole controller method into this command without having to touch the code ;)

Comments

[Arda]

Alternatively, you can also use a service like setcronjob + iron.io push queue. I use it in the production servers where I don't have access to crontab.

[itachi]

@Arda can you explain that approach a little? any info on that? i never understood the purpose of iron.

[Arda]

@itachi Think like this: in my example, what iron.io does is goes to a request and waits for you to complete. You make a conjob request to setcronjob, on the time, the cronjob service triggers the queue engine, queue engine makes a push request to your action and waits until it's completed. Cronjob service can also wait (setcronjob can only wait like 15 seconds if I recall correctly), but your request may take longer time (imagine something like mass emailing with a remote SMTP service etc. and sending emails to 1000 individuals), so queueing brings benefit here.

[Snapey]

I agree, creating artisan command is probably the best, but in some circumstances CRON of a LYNX command can be used - especially if you want the option to also run the same task from a browser.

[Sameer Shaikh]

i am doing this in my terminal 'php artisan cronjob:execute' but it is giving me the error runtimeException.. not enough arguments..

[ajtrichards]

To run the command in your terminal you'd need to run php artisan command:my_foo_command. With my_foo_command being the name of the command you've setup in your command file.