What is a cron job?

Many Drupal modules have tasks that have to take place from time to time. Think of cron as the tolling of a bell, letting Drupal know that it should perform the appropriate tasks.

The actual "cron job" is a time-triggered action that is usually (and most efficiently) performed by your website's hosting server, but can also be configured by a remote service or even from your own desktop.

For your Drupal site, what actually happens is that the cron job triggers an invisible visit to the site's cron.php file (http://www.example.com/cron.php) which, in turn, executes tasks on behalf of installed modules.

Triggering Drupal cron without a cron job

With the inclusion of "Poor man's cron" in the Drupal 7 core, it is no longer necessary to set up a cron job on your web server. Instead, you can configure the frequency with which cron is run on admin/config/system/cron (Administration > Configuration > System > Cron).

In Drupal 6, you can do the same thing by installing the contributed Poormanscron module.

• Configuring cron jobs using the cron command


• Running cron manually


• Solving cron problems


• Multisite cron


• Configuring cron without wget, lynx, or curl commands