In the scenario where you want to execute tasks repeatedly at a specific time and have full control over when they are executed and how the results are handled, it makes sense to build this into your application instead of setting up a cron job, for example. I’d like to give you a quick example of how you can achieve this in PHP using two great libraries,ReactPHPandcron-expression. ReactPHP is an event-driven programming library that has an event loop at its core. cron-expression understands CRON expressions, can determine if they are due to be executed and calculate the next execution date of the expression. The following is a simple example of scheduling tasks based on these two libraries:
isDue($now)) { Loop::futureTick(function () use ($task) { $task(); }); } // Function that executes the task // and adds a timer to the event loop to execute the function again when the task is next due: $schedule = function () use (&$schedule, $task, $cron) { $task(); $now = new DateTime(); $nextDue = $cron->getNextRunDate($now); Loop::addTimer($nextDue->getTimestamp() - $now->getTimestamp(), $schedule); }; // Add a timer to the event loop to execute the task when it is next due: $nextDue = $cron->getNextRunDate($now); Loop::addTimer($nextDue->getTimestamp() - $now->getTimestamp(), $schedule); } // Run example task every minute: $cron = new CronExpression('* * * * *'); $task = function () { echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s') . ": Task running\n"; }; schedule($task, $cron);
