Setting up the cron job

A few POS features work quietly in the background — emailing your scheduled reports, taking automatic backups, warning you about low stock. For any of that to happen, your server needs to poke the POS once a minute. That poke is called a cron job, and you set it up once, in about two minutes.

What a cron job is

A cron job is your server's alarm clock. You tell it "run this command every minute", and from then on it does — day and night, whether or not anyone is logged in.

The POS uses a single one. Every minute the server runs one short command; the POS looks at its to-do list, sees whether anything is due right now, and either does it or goes straight back to sleep. When nothing is due — which is most minutes — it costs practically nothing.

What needs it

The POS works perfectly well without a cron job for selling, stock and reports you run yourself. What stops working is everything that's meant to happen on its own:

Start here: Settings → Scheduler

Before you go anywhere near your hosting panel, open Settings → Scheduler in the POS. It does most of this page's work for you:

• It tells you whether the cron job is already running — a plain Working, Working, but slowly, Cron job not set up or Stopped, with the time it last ran.
• It shows the exact command to paste, already filled in with your installation's real folder path — nothing to work out by hand. There's a Copy button next to it.
• It offers a second version of the command with the full path to PHP, for hosts where the plain one doesn't run.
• It has a Test button that watches for the next run and tells you within a minute or two whether your cron job is really firing.
• It has a fallback for hosts that don't offer cron at all — see no cron on your hosting?

The rest of this page explains what that command means and where to paste it in the common hosting panels.

The command

This is the whole thing. It's the same on every host — only the folder path and the word php may need adjusting for yours, and Settings → Scheduler has already filled the path in for you.

cd /home/username/public_html && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

Read left to right, it says: go into the folder where the POS is installed, run its scheduler, and throw away any output so your inbox doesn't fill up. Three things in it are yours to fill in:

And the schedule itself — "every minute" — is written as five stars:

*     *     *     *     *
│     │     │     │     │
│     │     │     │     └─ day of week   (0–6)
│     │     │     └─────── month         (1–12)
│     │     └───────────── day of month  (1–31)
│     └─────────────────── hour          (0–23)
└───────────────────────── minute        (0–59)

All stars means "every value" — so, every minute of every hour of every day. In most control panels you don't type the stars at all; you pick Once per minute from a dropdown.

cPanel, step by step

The most common setup on shared hosting.

1. Open Cron Jobs

   Log in to cPanel and, under Advanced, click Cron Jobs. (Use the panel's search box if you can't spot it.)

2. Set the schedule to every minute

   Under Add New Cron Job, open Common Settings and choose Once Per Minute (* * * * *). The five boxes below fill themselves in.

3. Paste the command

   In the Command box, paste the command from above, with your own folder path in place of /home/username/public_html.

4. Add the cron job

   Click Add New Cron Job. It appears in the list below and starts running within a minute. That's it.

5. Stop the email notifications (optional)

   cPanel emails you the output of every run by default. Clear the Cron Email field at the top of the page, or your inbox will get 1,440 messages a day.

Plesk, step by step

1. Open Scheduled Tasks

   Go to Websites & Domains → your domain → Scheduled Tasks, then Add Task.

2. Choose "Run a command"

   Set Task type to Run a command. In Command, enter the full path to PHP followed by artisan schedule:run, and set the working directory to your POS folder if Plesk offers the option.

3. Run it every minute

   Set Run to Cron style and enter * * * * *.

4. Test, then switch notifications off

   Use Run Now to check it doesn't error, set Notify to Do not notify, then OK to save.

DirectAdmin & other panels

Every panel has the same two boxes — when and what — under a name like Cron Jobs, Scheduled Tasks or Task Scheduler. In DirectAdmin it's Advanced Features → Cronjobs. Set the five timing fields to * and paste the same command. If you genuinely can't find it, send your host's support team this line: "Please add a cron job that runs php artisan schedule:run every minute in my POS folder." — they do this daily.

VPS or dedicated server (SSH)

If you have terminal access, edit the crontab of the user that owns the site files:

crontab -e

Add this line at the end, save, and exit:

* * * * * cd /var/www/pos && /usr/bin/php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

Confirm it saved with crontab -l.

No cron on your hosting?

A few budget plans offer no cron job at all — only "open this web address on a schedule". The POS has a fallback for exactly that case, in Settings → Scheduler, at the bottom of the page.

1. Generate a cron URL

   Click Generate cron URL. You get a private web address unique to your shop. Until you do this, the address doesn't exist at all — nothing is exposed on a normal install.

2. Point something at it every minute

   Use your host's "fetch a URL on a schedule" feature, or a free external service such as cron-job.org. The page also gives you a wget version if your panel wants a command rather than a link.

3. Check the status turns green

   Come back to Settings → Scheduler after a minute or two — the status at the top should say the scheduler is working.

Finding your folder and PHP paths

The folder path

You need the folder that contains the file called artisan — the same folder you uploaded during installation. In cPanel's File Manager, open that folder and read the path shown at the top; it usually looks like /home/username/public_html, or /home/username/public_html/pos if you installed into a subfolder. Over SSH, cd into it and run pwd.

The PHP path

Plain php works on most hosts. But many shared hosts keep several PHP versions installed and the default one for cron can be older than the one your website uses — and the POS needs PHP 8.2 or newer. If you hit that, use the full path instead. Common ones:

Not sure which? Your host's PHP selector page normally shows the exact path, and support will tell you in a one-line reply. Over SSH, which php and php -v answer it in a second.

How daily tasks behave

Daily work such as scheduled backups uses the configured company/store timezone. A task claims its eligible window before running, so frequent cron ticks do not start overlapping copies. If a shared-host cron misses the opening minute and returns later in the allowed window, the task can catch up once rather than disappearing for the day.

The Scheduler page records heartbeat and task-run evidence. A manual backup or other manual action does not pretend that its scheduled version ran. Failed or interrupted work remains visible for investigation instead of retrying blindly every minute.

Checking that it works

1. Open Settings → Scheduler and press "Test my cron job"

   This is the direct answer, and it takes under a minute. The page watches for your server to run the scheduler and turns green the moment it does. It never runs anything itself — so a pass is proof that your cron job fired, not just that the POS is alive.

2. Read the status at the top of that page

   Even without running a test, the page always shows one of: Working, Working but slowly (your host limits how often cron may run — usually fine), Cron job not set up, or Stopped. Settings → System Health repeats the same verdict alongside the other install checks.

3. If the test times out, look at the output

   Temporarily remove >> /dev/null 2>&1 from the end of the command so the server emails you what the run printed. The error message is usually self-explanatory — see the table below. Put it back once fixed.

4. End-to-end proof (optional)

   Create a scheduled report to your own address a few minutes ahead and wait for it to land. This also exercises your email settings — use Run now first to rule email out.

Common problems

Tips & best practices

Notes & warnings

Related: Installation & setup · Scheduled reports · Backup & restore · Troubleshooting