How to configure cronjobs in cakephp?

Ideally you should do this on your Model layer, I think you should rethink this option by directly calling Controller .

To do this, you must first create a task shell , which will run in the task scheduler of your server. Let's suppose you want to clean a photos table every half hour, so you create a task from a app/Console/Command/PhotoShell.php file something like this:

class PhotoShell extends AppShell {
    public function limpar() {
        ClassRegistry::init('Photo')->limpar();
    }
}

And your model Photo would have the limpar() method implemented like this:

public function limpar() {
    $this->query('TRUNCATE ' . $this->useTable);
}

Ready, done, just include in your cronjobs :

0,30 * * * * /app/Console/cake Photo limpar

Remembering that the cake file must have the proper execute permissions.

From the cakebook itself

  */5  *    *    *    *  cd /full/path/to/app && Console/cake myshell myparam
  # *    *    *    *    *  command to execute
  # │    │    │    │    │
  # │    │    │    │    │
  # │    │    │    │    \───── day of week (0 - 6) (0 to 6 are Sunday to Saturday,
    |    |    |    |           or use names)
  # │    │    │    \────────── month (1 - 12)
  # │    │    \─────────────── day of month (1 - 31)
  # │    \──────────────────── hour (0 - 23)
  # \───────────────────────── min (0 - 59)

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