All 7 PHP CLI Scripting questions
More in PHP CLI Scripting
How do you run a PHP script from the command line, and how does this differ from running PHP through a web server? How do you access command line arguments passed to a PHP script using the $argv and $argc superglobals? How does the getopt function provide a more structured way to parse command line options and flags compared to manually processing the $argv array? How do PHP frameworks like Laravel's Artisan or Symfony's Console component let you build well structured, reusable custom command line commands? How should a long running PHP CLI script, such as a queue worker, handle graceful shutdown when it receives a termination signal from the operating system? What memory management considerations apply specifically to long running PHP CLI scripts, such as queue workers, that might process thousands of jobs without ever restarting?
Advertisement
Back to results for “Deployment”
PHP › PHP CLI Scripting

How do you schedule a PHP script to run automatically at regular intervals using cron on a Linux server?

Intermediate

Answer

Cron is a standard Linux utility for scheduling recurring tasks, and you can configure it to run a PHP script at specific times or intervals, such as every night at midnight, by adding an entry to the system's crontab file specifying the schedule and the exact command to run, which is commonly used for tasks like sending scheduled reports, cleaning up old data, or triggering a queued job processor at regular intervals.
# Crontab entry running a script every night at midnight
0 0 * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/scripts/cleanup.php
Real-world example A company schedules a PHP script to run automatically every night through cron, generating and emailing a daily sales summary report to management without requiring anyone to manually trigger it each day.

Common follow-ups: What does each field in a standard crontab schedule entry represent?;How do modern frameworks like Laravel provide their own built in task scheduling on top of a single cron entry?

Deployment & Hosting for PHP Applications;Email Sending in PHP (PHPMailer & SMTP)
All 7 PHP CLI Scripting questions