I know there are many posts about using CRON to run a php file. But, in the world of shared hosting, and ease of setup for a user, I don’t want to have to mess with that.
I found another solution online that has to do with sockets. Just wanted to get everyones take on this, and tell me if this is a good or bad idea. Sounds like it works well.
Thoughts?
//Open socket connection to cron.php
$socketcon = fsockopen($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],80,$errorno,$errorstr,10);
if($socketcon) {
$socketdata = "GET /cron.php HTTP 1.1\r\nHost: ".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']."\r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n";
fwrite($socketcon,$socketdata);
//Normally you would get all the data back with fgets and wait until $socketcon reaches feof.
//In this case, we just do this:
fclose($socketcon);
} else {
//something went wrong. Put your error handler here.
}
cron.php:
//This script does all the work.
sleep(200);
//To prove that this works we will create an empty file here, after the sleep is done.
//Make sure that the webserver can write in the directory you're testing this file in.
$handle = fopen('test.txt','w');
fclose($handle);
Found the script from a blog post: http://syn.ac/tech/13/creating-php-cronjobs-without-cron-and-php-cli/
It’s not a bad method, but you need to ensure that by closing the socket it isn’t just terminating the script before it finishes. You can set sockets to non-blocking.
I would still use a cron job, even if it is a bit of a pain.