ATutor

Automated tasks without cron set up

• talser
  

  2013-08-09 13:48:42

  Automated tasks without cron set up

  I have been running atutor 1.6.3 for a while and noticed that i did not set up cron but some automated things have occurred. Are there mechanisms that run scheduled tasks even if cron is not set up?
  
  
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• greg
  

  2013-08-09 14:04:00

  Re: Automated tasks without cron set up?

  It depends on the modules you have installed, whether cron is used or not. I think the only standard module that uses cron is the forums module, for sending out messages as a daily digest for instance, instead of sending as they are posted. This might be used to reduce load on a mail server if you are on a busy system.
  
  Otherwise cron is not needed or used on most systems.

• talser
  

  2013-08-09 14:11:23

  Re: Automated tasks without cron set up?

  The reason i am asking is because i am trying to write my own module and i was going to use the cron hook. I was just curious if i could write it so that the user did not need to install cron for it to work once a day.

• greg
  

  2013-08-09 14:44:10

  Re: Automated tasks without cron set up?

  Cron is the strategy we've been using for automated task.
  
  There are other ways to mimic such tasks. Not knowing what your module will do, you could set a particular action to trigger a task. If you wanted to do a daily mailing for instance, you could use the first login (or whatever) after midnight to trigger the mail. If the cron hook is not setup, default to the login trigger, etc. Certainly not perfect, but perhaps good enough as a backup when cron is not available.