Background tasks
In order to operate properly, iTop maintenance operations and
asynchronous tasks must be executed on a regular basis. In order to
ease the installation, all the background tasks have been grouped
to be launched from a single file:
webservices/cron.php
The following features rely on the activation of cron.php
-
Asynchronous emails. By default, this option is disabled. To enable it, set 'email_asynchronous' to 1 in the configuration file
-
Check ticket SLA. Tickets reaching the limits will be passed into Escalation TTO/TTR states
Many Extensions rely on this cron as well, for exemple: Ticket Creation from Email
Scheduling on Windows
Use schedtask.exe or the 'at' command to schedule cron.php to run every 5 minutes.
schtasks.exe /create /sc minute /mo 5 /tn "iTop CRON" /tr "\"/var/www/itop/webservices/cron.cmd\""
Scheduling on Linux
Edit the crontab to execute the script every 5 minutes:
*/5 * * * * www-data /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/itop/webservices/cron.php --param_file=/etc/itop/params >>/var/log/itop-cron.log 2>&1
cron.php
using root user!Scheduling from the web
The page cron.php can also be executed through the web server. This is useful if you don't have access to the system (for example on shared hosting systems). In such a case you can rely on a web cron service to run it for you. But the frequency and execution times will probably be restricted compared to a natively scheduled job.
Arguments
Argument | Description | Defaut value |
---|---|---|
param_file | Path to the parameters file | cron.params |
auth_user | User login - CLI mode only, if no parameters file is used | - |
auth_pwd | User password - CLI mode only, if no parameters file is used | - |
verbose | if set to 1, more information will be given, use this for troubleshooting. Beware: since the process runs continuously in background, the log files tend to become big pretty quickly. Don't set this options to 1 for a long period of time. | 0 |
status_only | (New in iTop 2.0.1) if set to 1, a status about
the scheduled tasks is displayed and the process stops immediatly
(can be launched in parallel to the normal execution of
cron.php ). |
0 |
Parameter file
Since the arguments passed to cron.php on the command line are visible to other users on the system, a recommended practice is to move all the sensitive parameters away from the command line. This is the purpose of the “parameter file”.
The argument param_file can be used with most of the REST/CLI web services. By convention, the cron.php service searches for a parameter file name « cron.params » to read its parameters from.
-
A parameter file contains key/value pairs.
-
Comments start with a # (any character found after `#` will be ignored)
Example:
- params.txt
-
# This is a parameter file # # If a parameter is given both in the file and in the arguments, # then the value given as argument is retained # # Authentication auth_user = qwertyuiop auth_pwd = ded!catedL0g1n # My web service size_min = 20 # Megabytes time_limit = 40 # Minutes
/etc/itop/
on Linux systems would be a good location)
or make a special exclusion rule in your webserver's configuration.
Only the process that runs cron.php from the command line should be
able to access this file.Settings
Those settings are configured into the main iTop configuration file: “itop-config.php”
Setting | Description | Defaut value |
---|---|---|
cron_max_execution_time | Duration (seconds) of the page cron.php, must be shorter than php setting max_execution_time and shorter than the web server response timeout | 600 |
cron_sleep | Duration (seconds) before cron.php checks again if something must be done | 2 |
email_asynchronous | If set to 1, the emails are sent off line, which requires cron.php to be activated. Exception: some features like the email test utility will force the serialized mode | 0 |
Allowed users
Only administrators are allowed to execute
cron.php
.