Set up cron for update and upgrade

To enable us to update or upgrade your system, you must have two cron jobs. Each cron job should run every minute.

The cron jobs schedule tasks for the Setup Wizard and for the updater application. These applications work together to install, update, and upgrade the Magento application and components.

About the Magento crontab

The Magento crontab is the configuration used to run Magento cron jobs.

Magento uses cron for two sets of tasks, and for each, cron can run with a different configuration:

  • PHP command-line configuration: The general cron job that reindexes indexers, generates e-mails, generates the sitemap, and so on.

  • Web server PHP plug-in configuration: Two other cron jobs are used by the Component Manager and System Upgrade utilities.

  • To avoid issues during installation and upgrade, we strongly recommend you apply the same PHP settings to both the PHP command-line configuration and to the PHP web server plug-in’s configuration. For more information, see Required PHP settings.
  • In a multi-node system, crontab can run on only one node. This applies to you only if you set up more than one webnode for reasons related to performance or scalability.

Create the Magento crontab

Starting with version 2.2, Magento creates a crontab for you. We add the Magento crontab to any configured crontab for the Magento file system owner. In other words, if you already set up crontabs for other extensions or applications, we add the Magento crontab to it.

The Magento crontab is inside #~ MAGENTO START and #~ MAGENTO END comments in your crontab.

To create the Magento crontab:

  1. Log in as, or switch to, the Magento file system owner.
  2. Change to your Magento installation directory.
  3. Enter the following command:

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    bin/magento cron:install [--force]
    

Use --force to rewrite an existing Magento crontab.

  • magento cron:install does not rewrite an existing crontab inside #~ MAGENTO START and #~ MAGENTO END comments in your crontab.
  • magento cron:install --force has no effect on any cron jobs outside the Magento comments.

To view the crontab, enter the following command as the Magento file system owner:

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crontab -l

A sample follows:

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#~ MAGENTO START c5f9e5ed71cceaabc4d4fd9b3e827a2b
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/magento2/bin/magento cron:run 2>&1 | grep -v "Ran jobs by schedule" >> /var/www/html/magento2/var/log/magento.cron.log
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/magento2/update/cron.php >> /var/www/html/magento2/var/log/update.cron.log
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/magento2/bin/magento setup:cron:run >> /var/www/html/magento2/var/log/setup.cron.log
#~ MAGENTO END c5f9e5ed71cceaabc4d4fd9b3e827a2b

The update/cron.php file exists in Composer- and archive-based Magento installations. It does not exist if you installed Magento by cloning the Magento 2 git repository.

In Composer-based installations, Magento creates the update/ directory when you run composer create-project. Running composer install does not create the update/ directory (if it did not exist before). See Recreate the Magento updater.

For more information about cron, including how to remove a crontab and run cron from the command line, see Configure and run cron.