Reviewed 230525

Drupal has a cronjob that is run periodically to run any background tasks within the content management system. This page covers some of the configuration around it.

Pantheon Cron

Pantheon's Cron is run once an hour, generally between 5-10 minutes past the hour. They don't have a mechanism to increase the amount of times the cron is run. However, we do have some options available to us...

New Relic Synthetic Monitoring

Pantheon's New Relic can run Drupal's Cron.

1. Configure an external URL to run cron at admin/config/system/cron .

2. Visit Pantheon's New Relic by clicking on the "New Relic" button in the Pantheon's Site's Dashboard
   
   

   Open

   

3. Go to "Synthetic monitoring tab on the right-hand menu
   
   

   Open

   

4. Click "Create your first monitor"

5. Click "Create a new Ping monitor"

6. Use the name "Drupal Cron", with the tag "cron"

7. Set the URL to be Drupal's cron URL at admin/config/system/cron
   
   

8. Click "Save"

9. Now you will be able to monitor when the cron is run directly through New Relic.

Triggering Cron from a remote server

First, make sure that drush is installed on the server in question (duh).

1. For drush to successfully execute via cron, we must explicitly specify the PATH for environment variables. This will vary per server. (echo $PATH).

2. We must also set columns to bypass errors we'd occasionally get since we are not running drush via the terminal.

3. We use the absolute path for drush; cron doesn't know any better.

4. We pass the quiet flag, so that success, progress, and email messages are suppressed.

If you're running cron locally, you set it to run as the user with webserver permission, typically www-data:

Using drush aliases

It's much cleaner and maintainable to manage drush aliases, though.

Triggering cron via HTTP

We can trigger cron by visiting a URL. Drupal 7 introduces a secure token to this approach to protect the server from DDoS attacks.

You can run cron at the URL secured by visiting the site's unique token in the browser, like so:

^{https://mysite.com/cron.php?cron_key=y85HnNQxjdqM-deRXj2Xrp2MJumqe1HGPSXhW8jftyI}

Drupal 6

Running cron as user1

Here is how we would set up cron job with curl, and authenticate as user1. No token required.

HttpAuth

In drupal 6, we can still use drush, but here is another way to do the same thing with wget AND bypass HttpAuth password block, such as can be provided by .htaccess, httpd.conf or by nginx.

Running cron over SSL

When using SSL, add one additional argument when calling wget: --no-check-certificate. Do not put “--no-check-certificate” between the -0 and the -.

Resources

• run drupal cron tasks from Drush: http://drush.ws/docs/cron.html

• Configuring cron jobs using the cron command: https://drupal.org/node/23714

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