Scheduling Tasks with CRON Jobs in 5G Software

Scheduling Tasks with Cron Jobs
Cron Jobs are used for scheduling tasks to run on the server. They’re most commonly used for automating system maintenance or administration. However, they are also relevant to web application development. There are many situations when a web application may need certain tasks to run periodically.

Definitions
First let’s familiarize ourselves with the terms related to this subject.

“Cron” is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS etc…). And these jobs or tasks are referred to as “Cron Jobs”.

There is a cron “daemon” that runs on these systems. A daemon is a program that runs in the background all the time, usually initiated by the system. This cron daemon is responsible for launching these cron jobs on schedule.

The schedule resides in a configuration file named “crontab”. That’s where all the tasks and their timers are listed.

Why Use Cron Jobs?
Server admins have been using cron jobs for a long time. But since the target audience of this article is web developers, let’s look at a few use cases of cron jobs that are relevant in this area:

If you have a membership site, where accounts have expiration dates, you can schedule cron jobs to regularly deactivate or delete accounts that are past their expiration dates.

You can send out daily newsletter e-mails. If you have summary tables (or materialized views) in your database, they can be regularly updated with a cron job. For example you may store every web page hit in a table, but another summary table may contain daily traffic summaries.

You can expire and erase cached data files in a certain interval.

You can auto-check your website content for broken links and have a report e-mailed to yourself regularly.

You can schedule long-running tasks to run from a command line script, rather than running it from a web script. Like encoding videos, or sending out mass e-mails.

You can even perform something as simple as fetching your most recent Tweets, to be cached in a text file.