I have a wordpress site live , I would like to schedule a daily job via cpanel to feed a custom stats table. I am a new to the concept of croning job. I would like some suggestion, also I noticed that a lot of tutorials talks about a file wp-cron.php do i need to schedule the job in wordpress as explained bellow and then replace the wordpress cron with the cpanel cron? or I can directly create a cpanel cron?
wordpress cron
register_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'my_activation');
function my_activation() {
if (! wp_next_scheduled ( 'my_hourly_event' )) {
wp_schedule_event(time(), 'hourly', 'my_hourly_event');
}
}
add_action('my_hourly_event', 'do_this_hourly');
function do_this_hourly() {
// do something every hour
}
To make a real Cron Job for your site with cPanel. First, create a file to execute your task. To do this, I'd recommend putting the file in the root directory of your account, rather than in the public_html folder. Create a file like, my-wp-cron.php
<?php
include dirname(__FILE__) . '/public_html/wp-load.php'; // Load WP Functions
// If your path is different, use it instead.
function my_cron_function(){
// do your cron function here
die();
}
my_cron_function();
Then in your cPanel - look for "Cron Jobs" and setup something like this:
/usr/local/bin/php /home/your_account_name/my-wp-cron.php
If your path isn't /home/ it should show your the path to your files in the Cron Job manager in your cPanel.
Set your cron schedule as you desire using the cPanel cron scheduler interface.