Custom cron job and cron group reference

This topic helps you set up crontabs and optionally cron groups for custom modules. If your custom module needs to schedule tasks periodically, you must set up a crontab for that module. A crontab is a cron job’s configuration.

You can optionally set up a custom group, which among other things enables you to run cron jobs defined in that group independently of other cron jobs.

For a step-by-step tutorial, see Configure custom cron jobs and cron groups (tutorial).

Overview of cron

Several Magento features require at least one cron job, which schedules activities to occur in the future. A partial list of these activities follows:

• Catalog price rules
• Newsletters
• Generating Google sitemaps
• Customer Alerts/Notifications (product price change, product back in stock)
• Reindexing
• Private sales (Magento Commerce only)
• Automatic updating of currency rates
• All Magento e-mails (including order confirmation and transactional)

We recommend you run cron as the Magento file system owner. Do not run cron as root; we also recommend against running cron as the web server user.

You can no longer run dev/tools/cron.sh because the script has been removed.

Magento depends on proper cron job configuration for many important system functions, including indexing. Failure to set it up properly means Magento won’t function as expected.

UNIX systems schedule tasks to be performed by particular users using a crontab, which is a file that contains instructions to the cron daemon that tell the daemon in effect to “run this command at this time on this date”. Each user has its own crontab, and commands in any given crontab are executed as the user who owns it.

Configure cron groups

This section discusses how to optionally create a cron group for a custom module. If you don’t need to do this, continue with the next section.

A cron group is a logical group that enables you to easily run cron for more than one process at a time. Most Magento modules use the default cron group; some modules use the index group.

If you’re implementing cron for a custom module, it’s your choice of whether or not to use the default group or a different group.

To configure a cron group for your module, create a crontab.xml file in your module directory: <your component base dir>/<vendorname>/module-<name>/etc/crontab.xml

For one group, the file should have the following contents:

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<config>
    <group id="<group_name>">
        <job name="<job_name>" instance="<classpath>" method="<method>">
            <schedule><time></schedule>
        </job>
    </group>
</config>

where:

The resulting crontab.xml with two groups may look like this:

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<config>
    <group id="default">
        <job name="<job_1_name>" instance="<classpath>" method="<method_name>">
            <schedule>* * * * *</schedule>
        </job>
        <job name="<job_2_name>" instance="<classpath>" method="<method_name>">
            <schedule>* * * * *</schedule>
        </job>
    </group>
    <group id="index">
        <job name="<job_3_name>" instance="<classpath>" method="<method_name>">
            <schedule>* * * * *</schedule>
        </job>
        <job name="<job_4_name>" instance="<classpath>" method="<method_name>">
            <schedule>* * * * *</schedule>
        </job>
    </group>
</config>

As an example, see Magento_Customer crontab.xml.

Specifying Cron group options

You may declare a new group and specify its configuration options (all of which run in store view scope) via the cron_groups.xml file, located in:

<your component base dir>/<vendorname>/module-<name>/etc/cron_groups.xml

Below is an example of the cron_groups.xml file:

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<config>
    <group id="<group_name>">
        <schedule_generate_every>1</schedule_generate_every>
        <schedule_ahead_for>4</schedule_ahead_for>
        <schedule_lifetime>2</schedule_lifetime>
        <history_cleanup_every>10</history_cleanup_every>
        <history_success_lifetime>60</history_success_lifetime>
        <history_failure_lifetime>600</history_failure_lifetime>
        <use_separate_process>1</use_separate_process>
    </group>
</config>

where:

Related topic Tutorial—configure custom cron jobs and cron groups