Setting Up a Cron Job in Plesk

I have been putting this off for a while. For some time, I have had the need to set up a cron job to run my website sitemap generators. Currently, I do them by hand. Every few days, I log in to each one and run the generator. This gets a little tedious, because I have to do about thirty of them.

I have always known there is a function in the sitemap generators that allows a cron job to kick the generators on. All I had to do was set it up. Now, I am not all that good with that little black screen…SSH. I mean, I use PuTTY for some things, but not all that much. I would rather use a nice GUI to take care of these tasks.

Well, it just so happens that Plesk offers that GUI. By the way, I am talking about Plesk 8.1 here.

Ok, the first thing I did was to login to Plesk. Then, I clicked on, “Domains.” I clicked the domain I was interested in setting up a cron job for. Next, I clicked the “Scheduled Tasks” icon and then the system user. Once I was done clicking all that stuff, I clicked the “Schedule a Task For …” That’s the easy part. Well, the rest is easy too, but at least I was at the place I had to be to set up the job.

Once I was at the task page, there were a few things I had to fill in to set up the job. First, I checked off “enabled.” I think that’s pretty self explanatory.

Basically, I wanted this php script to run every two days at 4AM. It’s pretty simple. For the first field, labeled, “Minute,” I put in a “0.” That will start at zero minutes of the hour. For the “Hour” field, I put in a “4.” This will start the script at the fourth hour of the day. It is based on the 24 hour clock. Ignore the periods after the digits. I put them in there just for grammar’s sake. For the “Day of the Month” field, I put in an “*.” I guess that means any day. I also put in an “*” for the “Month” field. For the “Day of the Week” field, I put in a “*/2.” This means that the script will be initiated every two days. For the last field, “Command,” I put in the path to the cron file in the script. That is something you will need to get from the script itself.

This was the first time I did this. If there is anything I missed, anything I did wrong or anything that might have been done more efficiently, please let me know by way of comment.