The scheduler is responsible for planning and running jobs.
A job is an automated background task: checking your mailboxes for new messages, search indexing new records, performing nightly maintenance, triggering automation timers, etc. There are several built-in jobs, and plugins can add new jobs.
Each job is repeated at a specific interval – a number of minutes, hours, or days. A job can be disabled to prevent it from running.
Different jobs can run at the same time. A job is locked while running to prevent multiple copies of itself from starting.
Each job has a “run now” link that will immediately run the job with logging enabled from inside your web browser. This is useful for troubleshooting and development, but the scheduler should be automated in production environments so that the jobs run without human intervention.
For Cerb’s scheduled jobs to automatically run in the background, you need to configure a third-party tool to request the /cron page every minute. On Unix-based systems this is accomplished with a cronjob1. On Windows Server you can add a Scheduled Task2.
If you're using Cerb Cloud, we handle this for you.
We recommend using curl or wget to request your scheduler URL every minute.
The /cron page doesn’t require a login to use. Instead, it is protected with an IP address3 allowlist. You can authorize additional IPs from the Security section, or from the AUTHORIZED_IPS_DEFAULTS setting in the framework.config.php file.