Cron Jobs
Mautic requires a few cron jobs to handle some maintenance tasks. Most web hosts provide a means to add cron jobs either through SSH, cPanel, or another custom panel. Please consult your host's documentation/support if you are unsure on how to setup cron jobs.
How frequently you run the cron jobs is up to you. Many shared hosts prefer that you run scripts every 15 or 30 minutes and may even override the scheduled times to meet these restrictions. Consult your host's documentation if they have such a restriction.
It is HIGHLY recommended that you stagger the following required jobs so as to not run the exact same minute.
For instance:
- 0,15,30,45 <— mautic:segments:update
- 5,20,35,50 <— mautic:campaigns:update
- 10,25,40,55 <— mautic:campaigns:trigger
Required
Segments
To keep the segments current:
php /path/to/mautic/app/console mautic:segments:update
By default, the script will process contacts in batches of 300. If this is too many for your server's resources, use the option --batch-limit=X replacing X with the a number of contacts to process each batch.
You can also limit the number of contacts to process per script execution using --max-contacts to further limit resources used.
Campaigns
To keep campaigns updated with applicable contacts:
php /path/to/mautic/app/console mautic:campaigns:rebuild
By default, the script will process contacts in batches of 300. If this is too many for your server's resources, use the option --batch-limit=X replacing X with the a number of contacts to process each batch.
You can also limit the number of contacts to process per script execution using --max-contacts to further limit resources used.
To execute campaigns events:
php /path/to/mautic/app/console mautic:campaigns:trigger
By default, the script will process events in batches of 100. If this is too many for your server's resources, use the option --batch-limit=X replacing X with the a number of events to process each batch.
You can also limit the number of contacts to process per script execution using --max-events to further limit resources used.
To send frequency rules rescheduled marketing campaign messages: Messages that are marked as Marketing Messages (such as emails to be sent as part of a marketing campaign) , will be inserted into a message queue IF frequency rules are setup as either systemwide or per contact. To process this queue and reschedule sending these messages, this cron job should be added to your list of jobs:
mautic:messages:send
NOTE that these messages will only be added to the queue if frequency rules are applied either systemwide or per contact.
Optional
Process Email Queue
If the system is configured to queue emails to the filesystem, a cron job is required to process them.
php /path/to/mautic/app/console mautic:emails:send
Fetch and Process Monitored Email
If using the Bounce Management,
php /path/to/mautic/app/console mautic:email:fetch
Social Monitoring
If using the Social Monitoring,
php /path/to/mautic/app/console mautic:social:monitoring
Webhooks
If Mautic is configured to send webhooks in batches, use the following command to send the payloads:
php /path/to/mautic/app/console mautic:webhooks:process
Update MaxMind GeoLite2 IP Database
Mautic uses MaxMind's GeoLite2 IP database by default. The database is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and thus cannot be packaged with Mautic. The database can be downloaded manually through Mautic's Configuration or the following script can be used as a cron job to automatically download updates. (MaxMind updates their database the first Tuesday of the month).
php /path/to/mautic/app/console mautic:iplookup:download
Cleanup Old Data
Cleanup a Mautic installation by purging old data. Note that not all data is able to be purged. Currently supported are audit log entries, visitors (anonymous contacts), and visitor page hits. Use --dry-run to view the number of records to be purged before making any changes.
This will permanently delete data! Be sure to keep database backups.
php /path/to/mautic/app/console mautic:maintenance:cleanup --days-old=365 --dry-run
Send Scheduled Broadcasts (e.g. segment emails)
Starting with Mautic 2.2.0, it is now possible to use cron to send scheduled broadcasts for channel communications. The current only implementation of this is for segment emails. Instead of requiring a manual send and wait with the browser window open while ajax batches over the send - a command can now be used. The caveat for this is that the emails must be published and must have a published up date - this is to help prevent any unintentional email broadcasts. Just as it was with the manual/ajax process - only contacts who have not already received the specific communication will have it sent to them.
php /path/to/mautic/app/console mautic:broadcasts:send [--id=ID] [--channel=CHANNEL]
Note
For releases prior to 1.1.3, it is required to append --env=prod to the cron job command to ensure commands execute correctly.
Tips & Troubleshooting
If your environment provides a command-line specific build of php, often called php-cli, you may want to use that instead of php as it will have a cleaner output. On BlueHost and probably some other PHP hosts, the php command might be setup to discard the command-line parameters to console, in which case you must use php-cli to make the cron jobs work.
To assist in troubleshooting cron issues, you can pipe the output of each cron job to a specific file by adding something like >/path/to/somefile.log 2>&1 at the end of the cron job. Then you can look at the contents of the file to see what was printed. If an error is occurring when running run the cron job, you will see it there, otherwise the file will be empty or have some stats. The modification time of the file informs you of the last time the cron job ran. You can thus use this to figure out whether or not the cron job is running successfully and on schedule. In addition it is recommended to enable the non-interactive mode together with the no-ansi mode when you run your commands using cron. This way you ensure, that you have proper timestamps in your log and the output is more readable.
Example output
$ php app/console mautic:segments:update --no-interaction --no-ansi
[2016-09-08 06:13:57] Rebuilding contacts for segment 1
[2016-09-08 06:13:57] 0 total contact(s) to be added in batches of 300
[2016-09-08 06:13:57] 0 total contact(s) to be removed in batches of 300
[2016-09-08 06:13:57] 0 contact(s) affected
If you have SSH access, try to run the command directly to see if any errors are generated. If there is nothing printed from either in a SSH session or in the cron output from above, check the server's logs. If you see similar errors to 'Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach()' in /vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Input/ArgvInput.php:287, you either need to use php-cli instead of php or try using php -d register_argc_argv=On.
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