It’s possible to setup process to run on a schedule provided that your server is setup to run cron. All internal cron jobs are run from a single page/script call. You’ll need to setup your server to either; make a request to /cron.php or execute /cron.sh.

The time delta that you set here will be the minimum delta for your Magento jobs.  IE: If your server’s cron  requests /cron.php every ten minutes and you create a cron job within Magento to run every five minutes, you shouldn’t be surprised to see it running every ten minutes instead of every five.

This won’t be a huge deal for all of you who are administering your own box, but for those of you on a shared box; you’ll likely be limited to a certain minimum delta which you’ll want to be aware of.

Setting up a cron job is actually really simple so lets take a look.  The configuration lives in config.xml, which shouldn’t be a surprise for you module developers.  Using my default example module Spinonesolutions_Helloworld:

/app/code/local/Spinonesolutions/Helloworld/etc/config.xml (partial)

<config>
...
<crontab>
<jobs>
<spinonesolutions_helloworld>
<schedule><cron_expr>*/10 * * * *</cron_expr></schedule>
<run><model>spinonesolutions_helloworld/observer::foobar</model></run>
</spinonesolutions_helloworld>
</jobs>
</crontab>
...
</config>

You can do a Google search on cron schedules in order to figure that part out, it’s outside the scope of this article.  The only other piece that deserves explanation is the static method call between the run tag.  As you’d expect my example call is referencing Spinonesolutions_Helloworld_Model_Observer (/app/code/local/Spinonesolutions/Helloworld/Model/Observer.php). This file doesn’t need to contain anything except for a class definition and a static method.

/app/code/local/Spinonesolutions/Helloworld/Observer.php

<?php
class Spinonesolutions_Helloworld_Model_Observer {
  public static function foobar() {
  }
}

That’s it.  Your static method will now be called on the schedule that you set!

cron, Magento, PHP