Cron jobs, or scheduled tasks, must be enabled in order for Magento to operate properly. The Product Labels extension from Intenso is built upon Magento's functionality, it also inherits this requirement.

 

By default if you're running a UNIX operating system it should automatically recognize Magento's requests to use the CRON TAB service. Magento needs Cron Jobs to be initiated for the following features to operate correctly:

  • Catalog Price rules
  • Sending Newsletters
  • Generating Google Sitemaps
  • Customer Alerts/Notifications (product price change, product back to stock)
  • Automatic updating of currency rates
  • Scheduled DB logs cleanup

 

Evidence of Magento not picking up CRON TAB tasks properly in Intenso is a notification message in the Product Labels section of the admin panel: "Cron is not running". If this is the case please enable Cron Jobs.

 

For additional information on Cron Jobs in Magento please refer to Magento documentation.

 

Setting up the Cron In a UNIX Based Operating System

You can use the crontab service command if you have shell access to the server, or add it through your cPanel or similar admin. You need to make the script run every 5 minutes, so in advanced configurations you'd be entering in:

*/5 * * * *

The your crontab should have something like one of these:

*/5 * * * * /bin/sh /[magento_path]/cron.sh
*/5 * * * * /bin/bash /[magento_path]/cron.sh
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /[magento_path]/cron.php
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/php -f /[magento_path]/cron.php

 

Setting Up the Cron Using cPanel Version 11

If you're using cPanel, you can setup a Cron Job using the advanced tab.

  1. Login to cPanel and locate the Advanced panel as shown here:cPanel - Advanced Tab
  2. Click on the Cron Jobs icon
    cPanel - Cron Job Icon
  3. Enter the following settings in the Add New Cron Job section, replacing [magento_path] with the path to your Magento install:
    cPanel - Cron Job Configuration
  4. Click Add New Cron Job to insert this cron job in the system.

 

Setting up a Scheduled Task In Windows

In windows you need to create a scheduled task that will execute the cron.php file every 5 minutes. To do this, go to the scheduled task manager and add a task to run the following command:

php C:\[magento_path]\cron.php

 

Additional Testing to see if CRON is running

You can place some probes into cron.sh and cron.php to confirm things are running.

 

You can add this to cron.sh after the INSTALLDIR variable is set:

# absolute path to magento installation
INSTALLDIR=`echo $0 | sed 's/cron\.sh//g'`
date >> "$0".log
whoami  >> "$0".log

 

And this to cron.php at the end of the file:

$log = fopen(__FILE__.'.log', 'a');
fwrite($log, date("Y-m-d H:i:s").PHP_EOL);
fclose($log);

After 6 minutes you should see both these files in Magento's directory if cron is running.

./cron.php.log
./cron.sh.log