kid astronaut

i have a website that requires frequent updates (every monday and thursday to be exact.) i have known for a while that auto-updating was a possibility, but never really known how. making sure to log on twice a week, upload a file, update the database and so on is kind of a pain.

tonight i looked a little bit into CRON, but the information i got was all very vague and outdates. as far as i can tell, it is a function in unix that checks every minute to see if it has any actions it is supposed to perform, and if it does it performs them? so if i set up a crontab to run update.php at midnight every monday and every thursday, this would accomplish what i need, right?

the problem is that i have no idea how to set this up, or even if it is possible with my setup. i've seen a couple tutorials, but they all assume that you're hosting your own website and that you have access to the command line or whatever it's called in unix. i'm hosted by a server like 1,000 miles away so that's not really possible.

does anyone know if there are any general steps to getting this started? or should i just contact my server and ask them about it?

or, is there any other way to automate a php script? i am not married to this cron thing at all.

asshopo

Does your host have any type of hosting software? CPanel? Most web hosting software will allow you to setup a cron of sorts and if you can't find it on your web hosting software, perhaps you need to contact the sales group of your host and see if they can add that for you.

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kid astronaut

No, they don't have CPanel, they've set up their own system. I emailed the host and asked if it was possible, he said yes but didn't say how.

I emailed him back, hopefully I'll have an answer shortly.

ratbastid

Do you have shell access on the server?

If so, check out man cron(5) (which you can read <a href="http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man5/crontab.5.html">HERE</a>).

A crontab will have one command per line. It'll start with five "time" fields: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week. So you could set something to run at 2:00am every monday and thursday with this:

0 2 * * 1,4 /command/line/thing

You write that file, then run the crontab on that file, and it installs it to your crontab, and then on the 1st and 4th days of the week, at 2 hours and 0 minutes, it runs whatever command is specified. Ta da!

But you've got to have shell access to use it, or have a tool your host gives you.

RelaX

You could also do it in an evil way, by making PHP and your visitors do your work for you.

You simply makes something that keeps track of the updates and every time a visitor comes on your site, it checks if it's monday or thursday (or if a monday or thursday has gone by without an update). If that is true, you can have it update your site.
A cron would be a much better solution though.

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ratbastid

Yeah, I've done that at sites that don't have cron. It obviously depends on fairly regular traffic.

trache

Build PHP as an executable (it's most popularly compiled into a Dynamic module loaded in Apache).. and run the script with the PHP4 executable under cron.

If this capability is something you need that your host is not giving you, go elsewhere. There are thousands of affordable hosting sites willing to take your money for the things you require.

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skaven

Yeah this is a pretty good solution if your site gets moderate to low amounts of traffic. Since the software would be updated before the triggering request is fulfilled, clients can be somewhat guaranteed that what they're viewing is at most 3-4 days old.