Ultimate Cron

The Ultimate Cron handling for Drupal. Runs cron jobs individually in parallel using configurable rules, pool management and load balancing.

2.9 READY! Ultimate Cron 7.x-2.9 is out now. Ultimate Cron 1.x documentation can be found at https://drupal.org/node/1666944

The old project page for Ultimate Cron 1.x can be found at https://drupal.org/node/2195381

Changes

* No more dependency to Background Process. Ultimate Cron now works without Background Process. However, Background Process is still supported for true parallelism
* Refactored to use cTools plugins, making it easier to extend Ultimate Cron.
* Now includes the daemonizer and queue throttling features, previously found in the modules Ultimate Cron Daemonizer and Ultimate Cron Queue Scaler
* Hopefully a more robust lock and logging mechanism.
* Integration with nodejs for live update on cron page
* Nagios support has not been re-implemented

Upgrade path from 7.x-1.x and previous
Upgrading from an earlier version of Ultimate Cron to a 7.x-2.x version has some caveats. See the documentation.

Plugins
Ultimate Cron is built upon 4 plugin types.


* Settings: - plugins that provide custom settings for jobs (bundled: general, queue).
* Schedulers: - plugins that provide a mechanism for whether or not a job should run at a certain time (bundled: simple, crontab).
* Launchers: - plugins that provide a way of launching jobs (bundled: serial, background_process).
* Loggers: - plugins that provide a logging backing for job status (bundled: database, cache).

Ultimate Cron 7.x-2.x documentation can be found at https://drupal.org/node/2195383

Features
* Works out-of-the box in most cases (or aims to)
* Parallel execution of cron jobs
* Configuration per job (enable/disable, rules, etc.)
* Multiple rules per cron job
* Pool management and load balancing using Background process
* Support for Drupal Queues
* Overview of cron jobs
* Log history of cron jobs
* Status/error messages per cron job, providing easy debugging of troublesome cron jobs
* Uses hook_cronapi() (Elysia Cron compatible, NOT 2.x, please use hook_cron_alter() for similar functionality)
* hook_cron_alter() for easy adding/manipulating cron jobs
* Poormans cron with keepalive a granularity of 1 minute
* Drush support (list, start, enable/disable jobs from the command line)

Dependencies
* cTools

Supported 3rd party modules
* Drush
* Advanced Help
* Features
* Node.js integration

Caveats
* Logging can be quite extensive for some. This can be controlled via Watchdog Filtering

Declaring new cron jobs From ultimate_cron.api.php

<?php /** * Inform Ultimate Cron about cron jobs. * * Note that the result of this hook is cached. * * @return array * Array of cron jobs, keyed by name. * - "title": (optional) The title of the cron job. If not provided, the * name of the cron job will be used. * - "file": (optional) The file where the callback lives. * - "module": The module where this job lives. * - "file path": (optional) The path to the directory containing the file * specified in "file". This defaults to the path to the module * implementing the hook. * - "callback": (optional) The callback to call when running the job. * Defaults to the job name. * - "callback arguments": (optional) Arguments for the callback. Defaults * to array(). * - "enabled": (optional) Initial state of the job. Defaults to TRUE. * - "tags": (optional) Tags for the job. Defaults to array(). * - "settings": (optional) Default settings (plugin type) for this job. * Example of a job declaring some default settings for a plugin called * "some_plugin": * 'settings' => array( * 'some_plugin' => array( * 'some_value' => 60, * ), * ), * - "scheduler": (optional) Default scheduler (plugin type) for this job. * Example of a job using the crontab scheduler as default: * 'scheduler' => array( * 'name' => 'crontab', * 'crontab' => array( * 'rules' => array('* * * * *'), * ), * ), * - "launcher": (optional) Default launcher (plugin type) for this job. * Example of a job using the serial launcher as default: * 'launcher' => array( * 'name' => 'serial', * 'serial' => array( * 'thread' => 'any', * ), * ), * - "logger": (optional) Default logger (plugin type) for this job. * Example of a job using the cache logger as default: * 'logger' => array( * 'name' => 'cache', * 'cache' => array( * 'bin' => 'mycachebin', * ), * ), */ function hook_cronapi() { $items = array(); $items['example_my_cron_job_1'] = array( 'title' => t('This is my cron job #1'), 'file' => 'example.jobs.inc', 'file path' => drupal_get_path('module', 'example') . '/cron', 'callback' => 'example_my_cron_job_callback', 'callback arguments' => array('cronjob1'), 'enabled' => FALSE, 'tags' => array('example'), 'settings' => array( 'example_plugin' => array( 'example_setting' => 'example_value', ), ), 'scheduler' => array( 'name' => 'crontab', 'crontab' => array( 'rules' => array('* * * * *'), ), ), 'launcher' => array( 'name' => 'serial', 'serial' => array( 'thread' => 'any', ), ), 'logger' => array( 'name' => 'cache', 'cache' => array( 'bin' => 'my_cache_bin', ), ), ); return $items; } ?> In fact, all options are optional, so the most minimal way of declaring a new cronjob is:

<?php /** * Implements hook_cronapi(). */ function example_cronapi() { $items = array(); $items['example_my_cron_job'] = array(); return $items; } /** * The callback for the cron job, */ function example_my_cron_job($job) { } ?> Related modules
* Feeds Ultimate Cron
* Ultimate Cron Aegir
* Ultimate Cron Rule
* Ultimate Cron Daemonizer
* Ultimate Cron Queue Scalar