Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Schedule vB's tasks with a host crontab

Schedule vB's tasks with a host crontab

!!! Warning You run this script at your OWN risk, I will not be responsible for any damage caused !!!

Description:

vBulletins schedule tasks only run when a user is browsing your forum. With the release of 3.6 and RSS imports this has caused problems for slow moving forums importing fast moving RSS feeds (If a news item passes fully through the RSS feed before a visitor browses your forums causing the import to be processed then content could be lost)

Solution:

If your host supports "Cron Jobs" you can call the attached PHP file periodically to force vBulletin to catch up with its internal scheduled tasks.

Installation

1. Download the attached file and edit the variables at the top to match your forum installation
2. Upload the file to somewhere on your host
3. Schedule this file to run at an appropriate interval

eg. (to run every hour at 15m past the hour, 12:15 - 13:15 - 14:15 - etc.)

15 * * * * /usr/bin/php -f /home/myuser/exec-cron.php >/dev/null 2>&1

Detailed Information

Unfortunatly running the cron.php from the vBulletin files will only process the next pending single task, This short script simply queries the scheduled task database to count how many tasks are pending, it then calls the cron.php routine that number of times - thus your scheduled tasks are kept up to date.

This is my first ever PHP script so please don't expect a masterpiece from a rocket scientist, if anyone has any comments or suggestions please drop me a PM

[jmw]

Doesn't work with vbulletin 3.6.8

[OmniBuzz]

any chance to have an update for the latest release of Vbulletin ?

[trilljester]

Yeah, I can't seem to get it to work anymore. Sad, but I'm uninstalling. I'll have to write a shell script or something to trigger the cron in VB every 15 minutes or something.

[Quarterbore]

I need something like this for my Devopment board where I need to test but there are no users to make the scripts work. I will see if I can get it working on my 3.6.x site.

[plothook]

This works for me using vB 3.8.3

save the code below into a script file named vbcronjob.sh, and call the script from cron (I schedule my crontab for once a minute). Be sure to chmod +x the script. The logic in this shell script is pretty much the same as in the cron-exec.php script you can download here.

you should also disable the cron image inserted at the bottom of the pages presented to your users. See This Mod for a simple plugin to do that.

#!/bin/bash

#----- environment setup -----#
# Absolute path to vBulletin root (where cron.php is located)
ct_pathtoforum='/home/user/public_html/forum/'
# Max tasks to run on one pass
ct_max=10

#----- database setup -----#
ct_dbhost='localhost'     # your MySQL Server
ct_dbport='3306'          # your MySQL Port
ct_dbname='forum'         # your vBulletin database
ct_dbuser='username'      # user with READ access
ct_dbpass='password'      # password for the above user
ct_dbprefix=''            # database prefix, if required

#----- query execution ----#
ct_date=`date "+%s"`      # current unix time
ct_connect="--protocol=socket -h$ct_dbhost -P$ct_dbport -u$ct_dbuser -p$ct_dbpass -D$ct_dbname"
ct_query="SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ${ct_dbprefix}cron WHERE active=1 AND nextrun < $ct_date;"
# -A, No automatic rehashing, gives quicker start.
# -B, Batch mode.
# -N, Don't write column names.
# -n, Flush buffer.
# -q, Don't cache.
# -r, Write raw fields.
# -e, Execute command and quit.
ct_repeat=`mysql $ct_connect -A -B -N -n -q -r -e"$ct_query"`

#----- cron execution ----#
ct_pathtophp=`which php` # path to PHP
cd $ct_pathtoforum
if [ "$ct_repeat" -gt "$ct_max" ]; then ct_repeat=$ct_max; fi
for ((i=0; ct_repeat>i; i++)); do
#echo "$i"
$ct_pathtophp ./cron.php >& /dev/null
sleep 5
done

exit 0