How to run drupal cron from cli

Dominique De Cooman

Thursday, November 18, 2010 - 13:17

Running cron from cli in drupal will result in.

PHP Warning:  include_once(): Failed opening './includes/bootstrap.inc'

Running cron from cli is useful when your behind external authentication and crontab is not available over http. Because normaly you would put something like:

0 * * * * wget --spider <a href="http://yoursite/cron.php

">http://yoursite/cron.php [/geshifilter-codes]

So here is what you should put in the crontab when you want it to call from cli. (Edit using "crontab -e" as command)

* * * * * php /home/ddcooman/workspace/extranet-client/src/drupal/cron.php

As said this gives the error. So here is the solution:
Create a new cron file "cronlocal.php" containing:

<?php
// $Id: cronlocal.php Exp $

/**
 * @file
 * Handles incoming requests to fire off regularly-scheduled tasks (cron jobs).
 */

$path='/home/ddcooman/workspace/extranet-client/src/drupal';
chdir($path);

include_once './includes/bootstrap.inc';
drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);
drupal_cron_run();
?>

The chdir will change the directory and bootstrap drupal. After drupal is bootstrapped the drupal cron is executed.

Tip: You can also use this trick to bootstrap drupal for running import scripts. The whole drupal api is available when drupal is bootstrapped.