Moodle Tech Tip – Cron

The Moodle Cron process is a PHP script that must be run regularly in the background as it runs various tasks at differently scheduled intervals.

Cron is vital to the operation of a Moodle site and triggers many things including, but not limited to:

• Forum posts digests
• Email processing
• Notifications – including the all important Assignment submissions
• Course Backups
• Emptying the Recycle Bin
• Processing enrolments and unenrolments
• Synchronising users (e.g. from external sources)
• … and MANY other things !

An administrator can see and schedule cron tasks very precisely from:

Administration > Site administration > Server > Scheduled tasks

(see Scheduled tasks)

If you are a Moodle administrator you should definitely read the main Moodle Docs:

https://docs.moodle.org/33/en/Cron

If you are not from a linux background, it’s really worth doing a little background reading about Cron too.

If you are hosting on Ubuntu/Debian then the distribution guides are pretty good:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CronHowto

A quick search on the net will also turn up plenty of generic guides such as this tutorial:

http://www.linuxweblog.com/crotab-tutorial

• About
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Stuart Mealor

Managing Director at HRDNZ

Stuart is interested in all things e-learning, with specific interests in Moodle, e-learning strategy, and business development.His experience in education over 30 years, MBA in International Business, and knowledge of e-learning systems implementation, together with graphic design background, give him a unique skill set for e-learning projects.

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