Contao ships with a cronjob framework out of the box. In short, this allows developers to register cronjobs for their own extensions in a simpler and consistent way.
By default, cronjobs are executed whenever someone visits the website. This can negatively affect the performance of your website, which is why it is recommended to set up real cronjobs on the server.
This is very easy to achieve thanks to Contao’s cronjob framework. All that is needed is a single minutely cronjob that initializes the framework. Contao then automatically takes care of running all registered cronjobs of the extensions at the correct intervals.
So we achieve a big advantage with a relatively small effort.
The cronjob for this must look like this:
* * * * * <php-binary> <contao-directory>/vendor/bin/contao-console contao:cron
Replace <php-binary> with the path to the PHP CLI binary of your current version. A complete
example could look like this:
* * * * * /opt/plesk/php/8.2/bin/php /var/www/vhosts/my.host.com/vendor/bin/contao-console contao:cron
Additional information can be found in the developer documentation.