Is it better to run Cron every minute or write Cron Job dynamically?

Question

I have a simple application where users can add a post and schedule it to go live at a certain time.

Now I have two approaches before me:

First Approach: I can set a script which will be called every minute and it will check if any posts are pending at the current time and will publish them if they are like so:

My Cron Job:

1 * * * * php myScriptToMakePostLive.php

or

Second Approach I can set cron jobs dynamically on server at the time when user submits his post to publish later. I am using this script:

 public function schedulePost(){
        $post = new Post();
        $post->body = $_POST['body'];
        $post->save();

        $scheduledTime = Carbon::parse($_POST['publish_on']);

        //saving cron dynamically 
        $output = shell_exec('crontab -l');
        file_put_contents('/tmp/crontab.txt', $output.PHP_EOL."{$scheduledTime->minute} {$scheduledTime->hour} {$scheduledTime->day} {$scheduledTime->month} * php myScriptToMakePostLive {$post->id}".PHP_EOL);
        echo exec('crontab /tmp/crontab.txt');
        die('Your post has been Scheduled !!');

    } 

What I want to know is which is the better approach and why?

Answer 1

Uh, to be honest, neither.

I'd use a scheduling service like celery. And if I absolutely had to roll my own scheduling service, it'd be with at and not cron

It also depends on how often you think users will have posts scheduled. I doubt it's all that often.