Creating & Running Cron in Magento 2 Custom Module

This article shows how to create and run cronjob in a custom module in Magento 2.

Here, we will focus on creating / setting up / running cron for a custom Magento 2 module.

Let us suppose, we are developing a custom module named Iyngaran_DemoModule (app/code/Iyngaran/DemoModule). To define the cron settings for your custom module, you need to write the following code in app/code/Iyngaran/DemoModule/etc/crontab.xml.

app/code/Iyngaran/DemoModule/etc/crontab.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
    xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:module:Magento_Cron:etc/crontab.xsd">
    <group id="default"> 
    <job name="iyngaran_cron_demo" 
         instance="Iyngaran\DemoModule\Cron\Demo" 
         method="execute">
        <schedule>*/15 * * * *</schedule><!-- run 15th minutes -->
    </job>
    </group>
</config>

As you can see from above code, we have defined to run the execute method of class Demo (app/code/Iyngaran/DemoModule/Cron/Demo.php) every hour when the cronjob is run in the server. The group id is set as “default”. You can give it your custom name as well.

Here’s the basic content:

<config>
    <group id="<group_name>">
        <job name="<job_name>" instance="<classpath>" method="<method>">
            <schedule><time></schedule>
        </job>
    </group>
</config>

Here is our class file. We will just log some text to test if the cron is working properly. The log text is saved in var/log/debug.log.

app/code/Iyngaran/DemoModule/Cron/Demo.php

<?php
namespace Iyngaran\DemoModule\Cron;
 
class Demo {
 
    protected $_logger;
 
    public function __construct(\Psr\Log\LoggerInterface $logger) {
        $this->_logger = $logger;
    }
    
    /**
     * Method executed when cron runs in server
     */
    public function execute() {
        $this->_logger->debug("Running Cron from Iyngaran's demo class");
        return $this;
    }
}

You can manually run cron from terminal/command line with the following command:

Run all cron jobs

sudo php bin/magento cron:run

If it doesn’t work (doesn’t create any entries in cron_schedule table) then try flushing cache first:

sudo php bin/magento cache:flush
sudo php bin/magento cron:run

After you run the above command, you can check your database table named cron_schedule. This table has fields like job_code, status, messages, created_at, scheduled_at, executed_at, etc. So, by looking into this table, you can know about the status of all the cron jobs.

Hope this helps.