Cron Job Settings for The Factory Extensions

 

 

 

What are CRON Jobs?

Cron is a service provided by most hosters – including Godaddy, Dreamhost, Hostgator, etc… that allowes you to run sheduled jobs to perform regular cleanups, backups or other scripts that need to run from time to time.

Why would you need that?

PHP is running only when users are visiting your site. You have no guarantee that at a specific time there will be an instance of PHP running on your webserver. This is why you have to ensure this through running at specific times the needed PHP script.

What “The Factory” Extensions need Cron jobs?
           

Auction Factory

Reverse Auction Factory

Raffle Factory
  • Closes Expired Auctions/Raffles and sends mail alerts to the involved parties (notification of chosen winner, notification to loosing parties, notification to auctioneer)
  • Notify about Auctions/Raffles about to expire in users Watchlist
  • Choses winners for automatic Auctions/Raffles
  • Purges auctions from deleted users
  • If enabled purges auctions that are archived longer then X months
  • Processes CRON in payment items (if needed for a specific payment item)

Ads Factory
  • Closes Expired Ads and sends mail alerts to the involved parties (Ads owner, users that added the ad in the favorites)
  • Notify about Ads about to expire in users Watchlist/Favorites
  • Purges Ads from deleted users
  • If enabled purges Ads that are archived longer then X months
  • Processes CRON in payment items (if needed for a specific payment item)

jAnswers Factory
  • Closes Expired Questions and sends mail alerts to the involved parties (Question owner, users that added the question in the favorites, users that answered the question)
  • Notify about Questions about to expire in users Watchlist/Favorites
  • Chooses the best rated answer for questions that are closed for mor then 24 hours and the owner has not yet chosen the best answer
  • Purges Questions from deleted users
  • If enabled purges Questions that are archived longer then X months
  • Processes CRON in payment items (if needed for a specific payment item)

Love Factory
  • Sends notifications about ending memberships (if enabled)

RSS Factory

RSS Factory PRO
  • Refreshes the feeds
  • inserts the content into Joomla Content (for PRO version)

What job should be executed for a specific Extension?

That depends on several factors: does your hosting service allow lynx, curl or wget to be executed in cron? If not, then you can execute the PHP script directly with the php binaries. At least one of these three options must be enabled for you in your hosting. If none works, then you should ask your hoster to enable at least one of it, since it’s a common practice for websites to use these techniques.

Lynx and wget are some sort of text web browsers in linux that help us access a web link as any other user would do. This is why all our CRON scripts are password protected. Some scripts have the password in the script itself, similar to:

//Change the password in the next line

define('AUCTIONS_CRON_PASSWORD','pass');

Other extensions like “RSS Factory” and “RSS Factory PRO” have the password stored in the admininstrator backend.

If you use lynx or wget, the cron job will access the script url as see in any browser. For instance : http://[yourserver]/components/com_bids/cron_action.php

Since we do not need to see the output of the script, we will inhibit the output from the call. This is why we will route the output of this command to /dev/null

Below is the list of CRON Jobs using lynx, curl or wget. If your hosting allowes only direct PHP call then read the next section. You must use just ONE of the three calls sampled here. We included all three types of calls in order to cover all types of hosting.

Auction Factory

lynx -accept_all_cookies –dump 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_bids/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

wget -O - -q 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_bids/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

curl --silent –compressed 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_bids/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

Reverse Auction Factory

lynx -accept_all_cookies –dump 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_rbids/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

wget -O - -q 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_rbids/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

curl --silent –compressed 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_rbids/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

Raffle Factory

lynx -accept_all_cookies –dump 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_bids/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

wget -O - -q 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_bids/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

curl --silent –compressed 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_bids/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

Ads Factory

lynx -accept_all_cookies –dump 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_adsman/cron_adsman.php?pass=[yourpass]'

wget -O - -q 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_adsman/cron_adsman.php?pass=[yourpass]'

curl --silent –compressed 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_adsman/cron_adsman.php?pass=[yourpass]'

jAnswers Factory

lynx -accept_all_cookies –dump 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_jooanswers/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

wget -O - -q 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_jooanswers/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

curl --silent –compressed 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_jooanswers/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

Love Factory

lynx -accept_all_cookies –dump 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_lovefactory/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

wget -O - -q 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_lovefactory/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

curl --silent –compressed 'http://[yoursite]/components/com_lovefactory/cron_action.php?pass=[yourpass]'

RSS Factory

lynx -accept_all_cookies –dump 'http://[yoursite]/index.php?option=com_rssfactory&task=refresh&password=[yourpass]'

wget -O - -q 'http://[yoursite]/index.php?option=com_rssfactory&task=refresh&password= [yourpass]'

curl --silent –compressed 'http://[yoursite]/index.php?option=com_rssfactory&task=refresh&password= [yourpass]'

RSS Factory PRO

lynx -accept_all_cookies –dump 'http://[yoursite]/index.php?option=com_rssfactory&task=refresh&password=[yourpass]'

wget -O - -q 'http://[yoursite]/index.php?option=com_rssfactory&task=refresh&password= [yourpass]'

curl --silent –compressed 'http://[yoursite]/index.php?option=com_rssfactory&task=refresh&password= [yourpass]'

Several extensions need two types of jobs – Daily and every 5-10 minutes. The daily job checks actions that have to be triggered at midnight (for instance auction expiring). The normal job will check the current environment and act accordingly ( for instance check if auctions expired). For Daily jobs you have too append ‘&daily=1’ to the url. Example:

'http://[yoursite]/index.php?option=com_rssfactory&task=refresh&password= [yourpass]&daily=1'

Extensions that require daily jobs:

  • Auction Factory
  • Reverse Auction Factory
  • Raffle Factory
  • Ads Factory
  • jAnswers Factory
  • Love Factory

Extensions that require normal jobs (all 5-10 minutes):

  • Auction Factory
  • Reverse Auction Factory
  • Raffle Factory
  • Ads Factory
  • jAnswers Factory
  • RSS Factory
  • RSS Factory PRO

For users that have hostings that do not allow execution of curl, wget or lynx will have to execute the PHP directly as a command line. Most times the php interpreter is in the search path of the hosting, so you do not have to prefix the php with it’s path. Mostly php is located in /usr/bin or in /usr/local/bin. In order to execute a php script you should write for instance: /usr/bin/php [path-to-the-script]/script.php To be more specific you can check the following list. You have to know the installation path of your joomla site (not the URL! It has to be something like /home/myhosting/public_html/joomla )

Auction Factory

php [install-path]/components/com_bids/cron_action.php pass=[yourpass]

Reverse Auction Factory

php [install-path]/components/com_rbids/cron_action.php pass=[yourpass]

Raffle Factory

php [install-path]/components/com_bids/cron_action.php pass=[yourpass]

Ads Factory

php [install-path]/components/com_adsman/cron_adsman.php pass=[yourpass]

jAnswers Factory

php [install-path]/components/com_jooanswers/cron_action.php pass=[yourpass]

Love Factory

php [install-path]/components/com_lovefactory/cron_action.php pass=[yourpass]

RSS Factory

Not available in the current version

RSS Factory PRO

Not available in the current version

To run daily jobs you have to append “daily=1” to the command. Example:

php [install-path]/components/com_jooanswers/cron_action.php pass=[yourpass] daily=1

 

Note: Please mind the Apostroph before the URLS in the commands involving lynx, wget and curl.

Note: If the jobs do not seem to work, please try to find in your hosting help, or ask support if they support these calls.