Creating Sendy's Cron Jobs Within Virtualmin

Welcome to Part 19 of Installing Sendy and Virtualmin on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This page describes how to create Sendy's four cron jobs within Virtualmin on your AWS server.

A cron job is software code that runs on a regular basis. Sendy's cron jobs are used to send autoresponders, import email lists, send scheduled campaigns and segment mailing lists. Sendy will not work properly without these cron jobs running. 

Here are the steps to follow

1) If you have recently completed Part 16, you may already be logged in to Virtualmin.

Otherwise, log in to Virtualmin by navigating to Your Virtualmin Installation URL within your browser:

​(For the purposes of this guide, I have used testdemo.colcolmail.co.uk:10000)

The username is root and the password is the server root password you set within Part 3. Then click Sign in.

2) Within the left-hand Webmin menu, select System and then Scheduled Cron Jobs:

3) Click Create a new scheduled cron job:

4) Complete the Job Details as follows:

Execute cron job as: set to root
​Active?: set to Yes
​Command:  set to php /home/Your Chosen Subdomain/public_html/autoresponders.php > /dev/null 2>&1
​When to execute: select Times and dates selected below

Minutes: select All
​Hours: select All
​Days: select All
​Weeks: select All
​Months: select All

Date range to execute: select Run on any date

Then click Create.

5) The new cron job should now appear in the list:

Then click Create a new scheduled cron job.

6) Complete the Job Details as follows:

Execute cron job as: set to root
​Active?: set to Yes
​Command: set to php /home/Your Chosen Subdomain/public_html/import-csv.php > /dev/null 2>&1
​When to execute: select Times and dates selected below

Minutes: select All
​Hours: select All
​Days: select All
​Weeks: select All
​Months: select All

Date range to execute: select Run on any date

Then click Create.

7) The new cron job should now appear in the list:

Then click Create a new scheduled cron job.

8) Complete the Job Details as follows:

Execute cron job as: set to root
​Active?: set to Yes
​Command: set to php /home/Your Chosen Subdomain/public_html/scheduled.php > /dev/null 2>&1
​When to execute: select Times and dates selected below
​
​Minutes: select 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50 and 55
​Hours: select All
​Days: select All
​Weeks: select All
​Months: select All

Date range to execute: select Run on any date

Then click Create.

9) The new cron job should now appear in the list:

Then click Create a new scheduled cron job.

10) Complete the Job Details as follows:

Execute cron job as: set to root
​Active?: set to Yes
​Command: set to php /home/Your Chosen Subdomain/public_html/update-segments.php > /dev/null 2>&1
​When to execute: select Times and dates selected below

Minutes: select 0, 15, 30 and 45
​Hours: select All
​Days: select All
​Weeks: select All
​Months: select All

Date range to execute: select Run on any date

Then click Create.

11) The new cron job should now appear in the list:

12) Within the left-hand Webmin menu, select System and then System Logs:

13) The System Logs page should appear:

Click View for File /var/log/syslog

14) Check the /var/log/syslog file for entries confirming the four new cron jobs are running.

Each of the four jobs will run at least once every 15 minutes.

At 15 minutes past, 30 minutes past, 45 minutes past and on the hour, all four cron jobs should appear together:

If your Sendy and Virtualmin installation has not worked, click here to start Part 20 and try all over again. Alternatively, click here to return to the Introduction.

If you have any questions or comments about this page, please let me know so I can keep this website as helpful as possible.

Happy emailing with Sendy!

Maynard Paton​

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