Triggering the start of a task from a CRON job

Question

I have a site setup which is for subscribers only. I have added a user expiry date field to the users section and everything is working perfectly on the front end in that I can restrict access to accounts that have already passed their expiry date.

However I need to send notification emails to accounts that expire today or will expire in 7 days time.

I am using the mailer plugin in combination with a basic plugin I have made. I have setup a basic plugin with a controller which calls the following function from the plugins service:

public function sendNotificationEmail()
{
    //Create an EmailModel
    $email = new EmailModel;

    //Set the necessary attributes 
    $email->fromName = 'Joe Blogs';
    $email->fromEmail = 'joe.blogs@example.com';
    $email->subject     = 'Email subject';
    $email->htmlBody    = 'The message';


    //RecipientsModel
    $recipients = new Mailer_RecipientsModel();
    $recipients->recipients = array(
        array(
            'to' => 'jane.doe@example.com'
        )
    );

    if( $recipients->validate()){
        //Create mailer
        craft()->mailer_main->newMailer($recipients, $email); //This will start the MailerTask
    }


}

As you can see, at the moment I'm just sending a single test email each time. Everything works as expected but I've noticed that the task does not get triggered until I refresh the CP. This is a problem in my case, I think, because I want to trigger everything from a CRON job.

If anyone has any solution as to how to automatically trigger the task or if there are any alternative methods to solve this problem, I'd love to here them :)

btw, the reason I went down the task route was that the system could be sending to 100s of email addresses at a time and I didn't want to be (a) treated as spam or (b) get a timeout from the request

Answer 1

Everything you need to manage tasks is in the TasksService, so you should be able to just use that in your controller action to kick off any pending tasks, using something along the lines of:

if (!craft()->tasks->isTaskRunning())
{
    $task = craft()->tasks->getNextPendingTask();

    if ($task)
    {
        craft()->tasks->runPendingTasks();
    }
}

If you have a look around craft/app/services/TasksService.php you'll see you can also grab and run tasks by type which might be useful in this situation.

Answer 2

With the recent release of 2.3.2632, I've had success with curling the runPendingTask action as an ajax request.

0 2 * * * curl -H "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" http://example.com/actions/myPlugin/someController/runSomeTask
9 2 * * * curl -H "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" http://example.com/actions/tasks/runPendingTasks

So queue up the tasks, then 9 minutes later, run them.

The tasks controller will gracefully run the pending tasks. And since the request is an AJAX one, the controller will close the connection so you won't have any open HTTP requests while all of the tasks finish.

Answer 3

Ok, you are probably nearly there - all you need to do is call that controller action from the outside world. Here is a small example:

<?php
namespace Craft;

class MyPlugin_SomeController extends BaseController
{

  // this lets anyone run the controller actions we specify
  protected $allowAnonymous = = array('actionRunSomeTask');

  // this is the controller function you want to call
  public function actionRunSomeTask()
  {
    craft()->tasks->createTask('MyPlugin_Task');
    echo 'Task started!';
    craft()->end();
  }
}

Then you can access the url http://example.com/actions/myPlugin/someController/runSomeTask however you like. In cron you could then use something like wget to get the url:

0 2 * * * wget http://example.com/actions/myPlugin/someController/runSomeTask

All this information and more can be found in the docs: http://buildwithcraft.com/docs/plugins/controllers.

Edit:

I didn't really grasp the issue which is that Tasks only get set off when the cp is requested. To that end, one solution is to use something like PhantomJS to log in to the cp purely to start off the tasks. I have done this to actually set going something else more complex but here is a cleaned up example using PhantomJS and CasperJS to just access the cp and log in:

// make casper
var casper = require('casper').create();

// log in
casper.start('http://example.com/admin/login', function(){
  this.fill('#login-form', {
    'username' : 'someuser',
    'password' : 'somepassword'
  }, true);
});

// wait for the dashboard
casper.waitForUrl(http://example.com/admin/dashboard', function(){
  this.echo('Yay, logged in!');

  // maybe check for some evidence of the task running here

  casper.exit();
});

// tell casper to run the above sequence
casper.run();

I'm pretty sure at some point P&T will sort something more native out but for now this would work.

Answer 4

You may also want to register your route in your YourPlugin.php file, using the registerSiteRoutes method, example below:

public function registerSiteRoutes()
{
    return array(
        'myroute' => array('action' => 'myPlugin/myAction')
    );
}

Answer 5

I made a free plugin that may help. I had trouble running through http when there were many tasks.

The plugin executes tasks purely as cron (i.e. does not internally issue a curl or wget request).

I made the plugin available at: https://straightupcraft.com/craft-plugins/taskrunner

or you can view the code at: https://gitlab.com/24hoursmedia/craft2-plugins/craft2-taskrunner