Manage Cron Jobs

Most of EasyEngine v4’s server stack is on Docker containers. Running cron in containers is not as straightforward as it’s on a linux server. There are many caveats that you have to take care of in order to ensure cron executes as it’s intended and has no side effects.

Hence, EasyEngine v4 uses Ofelia to schedule and run cron. Ofelia runs in a separate container and it schedules all cron jobs according to a config. It also ensures that a second occurance of a particular cron job won’t start if the earlier one has not ended – something we found quite useful.

When Ofelia has to execute the cron, it runs the command into the target container similar to how we execute commands in container with docker exec.

Adding your cron jobs

Adding cron on a site

If you want to add cron to a site, use:

ee cron create example.com --command='wp core verify-checksums' --schedule='@daily'

The above command runs the given command in the site’s PHP container daily at midnight.

The schedule parameter also supports linux cron syntax. If you are not comfortable with cron syntax, you may find this site helpful.

To checkout the syntax supported by schedule parameter, run ee cron create --help.

By default the command executes with the user used to start the container. So in case of PHP container it is www-data.

If you want to run the cron with another user i.e. root, then you can pass --user=example parameter to it.

Adding cron on host 

You can even use EasyEngine to run crons on host! In fact, it is recommended to do so.

Primary reason being that you don’t want some cron jobs to run from EE (Ofelia) and some through traditional crontab as tracking and managing them might become a bit cumbersome when you have lots of cron to manage.

To run cron on host, use:

ee cron create host --command='~/backup.sh' --schedule='@daily'