Implementing and executing cron jobs

Sometimes, an application requires some background tasks such as re-generating a sitemap or refreshing statistics. A common way to implement this is by using cron jobs. When using Yii, there are two ways to do this, which are as follows:

• Emulate the browser to call the web application controller action

• Use the command-line command to run as a job

In this recipe, we will see how to implement both. For our recipe, we will implement writing the current timestamp into a timestamp.txt file under the protected directory.

Getting ready

Create a fresh application by using yiic webapp.

How to do it...

Carry out the following steps:

1. Create protected/controllers/CronController.php as follows:

   <?php
   class CronController extends CController
   {
     public function actionIndex()
     {
       $filename = Yii::getPathOfAlias("application")."/timestamp.txt";
       file_put_contents($filename, time());
     }
   }

2. Now we need a way to call it. As it is a web application controller, we need to...