Question

I have been building websites for several years now, mostly in php. Several of the sites have cronjobs, that typically run once a day. The php files that the cronjobs run are stored on the server, along with the files that deliver the site pages.

I know that various crawlers, legitimate and not, visit various pages of my sites. Now if a crawler would visit one of my cronjob files, this would activate the cronjob, sometimes with undesirable results.

I’m pretty sure that this has never happened, and, although I’m grateful for that, I’m trying to understand why. Of course there are no links anywhere to any of my cronjob url’s, but I’m pretty sure that various crawlers have visited other pages even though they were never linked to.

What do other developers do to address this issue? Put a line in the robots.txt file? Set the permissions of the cronjob-relate php files?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Don’t store any cron scripts in a publicly accessible directory.