Question

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PHP Curl script to pull data from remote server every 10 minutes

My friend’s website has XML generator for news feeds. I’m reading data from there and use it on my website (I have permission to do that). But… I have a script for that job under my admin panel so I have to call it manually and wait until processing is done (can’t close my browser). It works great but problem is that I need to update my database every 30 minutes (or every hour) and I can’t stay in front of my computer doing that 24 hours daily.

I’m now wondering, is there something that I can do to make this process automatized on server-side? In short, I want to run some kind of scheduler on my server that runs my script every (lets say) 30 minutes and do that job without my physical presence in front of computer.

I have not experience at all about this and actually don’t know where to look to find solution for this problem. Don’t know is that even possible?

So what I need here as answer is some suggestions or links or whatever helps in order to find solution for my problem. It’s not urgent and I have a lot of time to learn. Just tell me where to start searching.

Sorry if this is duplicate question, but I couldn’t search for anything because I didn’t know what search terms to use and have not idea yet what I have to look for.

I really appreciate any suggestion.

Answer 1

What you are looking for is cron (quoting) :

Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating
systems.
Cron enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell
scripts) to run periodically at certain times or dates.
It is
commonly used to automate system maintenance or administration…