Scheduled Hourly URL Launch

PHP scripts may need to be launched daily or hourly for any of a number of reasons. Some are:

• Temporary files cleanup.

• Reset database for demonstration software

• Create backups.

• Send reminder email.

• Scan a directory for unauthorized file changes.

• Obtain latest information from a remote site.

This software is in response to the antics a person has to go through to schedule the launch of PHP web pages at some hosting companies. Some hosting companies allow you to specify URLs in a cron schedule. Others do not.

Further, so far as I know, setting up a PHP web page to launch with method POST instead of GET is impossible with existing domain control panels.

In steps Scheduled Hourly URL Launch. It is a Perl CGI script so it can be launched with cron. The script is set up to run once every hour.

The Perl CGI script launches PHP web pages (any http://... URLs, actually) according to how things are set up in the Scheduled Hourly URL Launch admin control panel.

URLs can be set up to launch every hour. And URLs can be set up to launch daily during a certain hour (between 10:00 and 10:59, for example).

An email address can be provided in the admin control panel to be notified of any error messages should Scheduled Hourly URL Launch be unable to successfully launch a URL.

An email address can also be provided to be notified every time Scheduled Hourly URL Launch runs with a list of URLs it launched.

Download this software and installation instructions by clicking here. (Log-in, if you haven't recently.)