Configure cron jobs

Several Commerce features require at least one cron job, which schedules activities to occur in the future. A partial list of these activities follows:

• Catalog price rules
• Newsletters
• Generating Google sitemaps
• Customer Alerts/Notifications (product price change, product back in stock)
• Reindexing
• Private sales (Adobe Commerce only)
• Automatic updating of currency rates
• All Commerce e-mails (including order confirmation and transactional)

UNIX systems schedule tasks to be performed by particular users using a crontab, which is a file that contains instructions to the cron daemon that tell the daemon in effect to “run this command at this time on this date”. Each user has its own crontab, and commands in any given crontab are executed as the user who owns it.

To run cron in a web browser, see Secure cron.php to run in a browser.

Create or remove the Commerce crontab

This section discusses how to create or remove your Commerce crontab (that is, the configuration for Commerce cron jobs).

The crontab is the configuration used to run cron jobs.

The Commerce application uses cron tasks that can run with different configurations. The PHP command-line configuration controls the general cron job that reindexes indexers, generates e-mails, generates the sitemap, and so on.

Create the Commerce crontab

Starting with version 2.2, Commerce creates a crontab for you. We add the Commerce crontab to any configured crontab for the Commerce file system owner. In other words, if you already set up crontabs for other extensions or applications, we add the Commerce crontab to it.

The Commerce crontab is inside #~ MAGENTO START and #~ MAGENTO END comments in your crontab.

To create the Commerce crontab:

1. Log in as, or switch to, the file system owner.

2. Change to your Commerce installation directory.

3. Enter the following command:

   bin/magento cron:install [--force]
   

Use --force to rewrite an existing crontab.

To view the crontab, enter the following command as the file system owner:

crontab -l

A sample follows:

#~ MAGENTO START c5f9e5ed71cceaabc4d4fd9b3e827a2b
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/magento2/bin/magento cron:run 2>&1 | grep -v "Ran jobs by schedule" >> /var/www/html/magento2/var/log/magento.cron.log
#~ MAGENTO END c5f9e5ed71cceaabc4d4fd9b3e827a2b

Remove the Commerce crontab

You should remove the Commerce crontab only before uninstalling the Commerce application.

To remove the Commerce crontab:

1. Log in as or switch to the file system owner.

2. Change to the Commerce installation directory.

3. Enter the following command:

   bin/magento cron:remove
   

Run cron from the command line

Command options:

bin/magento cron:run [--group="<cron group name>"]

where --group specifies the cron group to run (omit this option to run cron for all groups)

To run the indexing cron job, enter:

bin/magento cron:run --group index

To run the default cron job, enter:

bin/magento cron:run --group default

To set up custom cron jobs and groups, see Configure custom cron jobs and cron groups.

Logging

All cron job information has moved from system.log into a separate cron.log.
By default, the cron information can be found at <install_directory>/var/log/cron.log.
All exceptions from cron jobs are logged by \Magento\Cron\Observer\ProcessCronQueueObserver::execute.

In addition to being logged in cron.log:

• Failed jobs with ERROR and MISSED statuses are logged to the <install_directory>/var/log/support_report.log.

• Jobs with an ERROR status are always logged as CRITICAL in <install_directory>/var/log/exception.log.

• Jobs with a MISSED status are logged as INFO in the <install_directory>/var/log/debug.log directory (developer mode only).