A Cron Job in Laravel 4

Question

I need a Cron job for execute a Scraper to a Website and send emails with the information, I made a Controller to do that, but when I set up the command to run that file

php app/controllers/ScraperController.php 

I get this error

PHP Fatal error: Class 'BaseController' not found in /var/www/U-Scraper/app/controllers/ScraperController.php on line 2

The thing is, it works when I set up with a route to that controller

Answer 1

Controllers don't run by themselves, they work as a component of Laravel. If you're loading your controller directly then Laravel is not being loaded and as far as PHP is concerned BaseController, as well as Laravel's Controller class, does not exist. Normally your web server loads public/index.php which loads Laravel and so on. If that's confusing you may want to learn about how autoloading with Composer works: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/easy-package-management-with-composer/

What you should do is write an Artisan command that does what you need and call that command using cron. This question gives details on how to accomplish this: Cron Job in Laravel

Answer 2

I suggest you to create new Artisan command instead of controller.

Then set CRON task to run your command, for example:

1 * * * * /usr/bin/php /path/to/the/artisan nameofthecustomcommand

If you cannot run/set task this way, but you can set the URL to execute

http://mydomain.com/cron.php

// cron.php
// I am aware I do use exec()
exec('php artisan nameofthecustomcommand');

More about Artisan commands here

There is a chance, you can put whole controller method into this command without having to touch the code ;)