This example describes how to execute Magento CRON jobs with a system CRON.

Why should/can i do this? When you run Magento on a Debian Linux for example, you've to register the cron.sh in your systems CRON table to be executed periodically. This is for sure NO big deal, but maybe come together with some handicaps like missing permissions to do this. If you run Magento inside appserver.io, life will a bit less complicated, because you're able to execute the Magento CRON by a Stateless session bean.

To do this, assumed you've installed appserver.io and your Magento instance will be delivered by appserver.io, you have two installation options.

For both options, you need the sources of this repository. So clone it, open a commandline, change into your working directory, which can be /tmp for example, and enter

$ git clone https://github.com/appserver-io-apps/magento-cron

The first option is pretty simple. Copy the SFSB into your Magento application folder. Given, you've installed Magento in a folder /opt/appserver/webapps/magento-cron in the application servers document root, do the following:

$ cd /opt/appserver/webapps/magento-cron
$ mkdir META-INF/classes/AppserverIo/Apps/Magento/Cron/SessionBeans
$ cp /tmp/magento-cron/src/app/META-INF/classes/AppserverIo/Apps/Magento/Cron/SessionBeans/CronSessionBean.php \
     META-INF/classes/AppserverIo/Apps/Magento/Cron/SessionBeans

Then restart the application server, open http://127.0.0.1:9080/magento-cron/admin in your favorite browser, login to the Magento backend and clear the Magento cache. The Magento CRON jobs will now be invoked every minute.

The second option is a bit more complicated, as it uses ANT to deploy the SLSB, a Servlet, that allows you to invoke the Magento CRON in your browser, and a dummy Magento extension, that will be invoked by the application servers Timer-Service the SLSB is bound to.

Change into the working copy with $ cd /tmp/magento-cron, then invoke ANT with ant deploy, restart the application server and finally clear the Magento cache. The Magento extension, the SLSB and the Servlet are now ready. The dummy extensions purpose is simple to log a message whenever the CRON invokes the method declared in the extensions config.xml.

You also have the possibility to invoke the CRON process manually. Simple use your favorite browser, request http://127.0.0.1:9080/magento-cron//invokeCron.do, and check the Magento system.log, assumed you've activated logging in Magento backend.

Keep in mind, that this is only a simple example and MUST* be tested before think of using in production!