How To Call PHP From a Cron in Plesk

Like a lot of people I needed to run a PHP script from a cron (crontab) via the Plesk server admin tool. Simply putting the path to the file (from root) does not run it. The way to do this is by calling the php processor with some parameters. So do the following:

php -q /var/www/vhosts/mywebsite.com/httpdocs/cron/my-file.php

Obviously use the path that relates to your file.

This seems to work for a lot of people, but as my script had includes in it I was getting failure to open stream errors when it was called. So to get round this, I changed the directory prior to the call. So it now looks like this:

cd /var/www/vhosts/ mywebsite.com /httpdocs/cron; php -q  my-file .php

Hey presto, it all works a treat now!

You may need to set permissions on the script to be executed. By default, the task will email the output of the script to you (click the Settings option on the Scheduled Tasks page to change the address - see image below). This can be turned off by adding 2>&1 to the end of the command. making the it look like this:

cd /var/www/vhosts/ mywebsite.com /httpdocs/cron; php -q  my-file .php /dev/null 2>&1

Credit to http://daipratt.co.uk/crontab-plesk-php/ and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3140675/php-cron-job-including-file-not-working for helping to work this mess out ;)