Need help configuring Windows Cron Batch file

by rjr, Monday, January 21, 2019, 13:33 (1894 days ago)

Hi everyone,

I need some help fillowing step 9 of the steps to create a "Windows Cron" batch file for updating RSS Feeds. It seems there are some details missing in these steps and/or I don't understand all the steps

Note:
- I've got selfoss running on Localhost and the selfoss page displays (although it's only text and not GUI which I think is another issue).
- Apache & SQL installed using XAMPP
- In XAMPP "www" folder is "htdocs" (where I copied the selfoss files to)

selfoss Windows installation instructions
https://github.com/SSilence/selfoss/wiki/Installation-on-Windows

Steps 9 & 10

####9. Next create a batch file: (This is our windows equivalent of crontab)

1) Open up a new file in a text editor, such as notepad.
2) Enter the following line:
start “URL of your webserver”/update

"e.g. start localhost/www/selfoss v2.1.3/update"

Q1: What is the purpose of the "/update" in the path above?
Q2: Is this a switch? or folder?
(There is no "update" folder in the URL file path

Q3: If I'm using "localhost" then what command string should the Windows batch file have?

Q4: Is this batch simply attempting to "refresh" the web page?

Q5: following the "e.g." above, My batch file has the following but this is a path so how does the RSS feed "update" work?
start http://localhost/update

For example, maybe the batch file should simply say "Start localhost"?

Thanks

Need help configuring Windows Cron Batch file

by jtojnar, Monday, January 21, 2019, 20:00 (1894 days ago) @ rjr

Q1: What is the purpose of the "/update" in the path above?

I think it is supposed to be URL of the update endpoint of selfoss. Perhaps start command opens the URL in web browser or something?

Q2: Is this a switch? or folder?

The endpoint would be redirected by the mod_rewrite to index.php, which is why it is important to make it work.

Q3: If I'm using "localhost" then what command string should the Windows batch file have?

I am not sure what you mean.

Q4: Is this batch simply attempting to "refresh" the web page?

Yes, that is what I would think. On the other hand, “adding the path for php” step would make me think that we would want to run the update script as if the batch file contained php.exe path/to/cliupdate.php (the recommended update procedure on Linux systems).

Q5: following the "e.g." above, My batch file has the following but this is a path so how does the RSS feed "update" work?

See above, or https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/

Note that the wiki is unofficial resource maintained by selfoss users. If you manage to make selfoss work on XAMPP, please try update the tutorial with the correct instructions.

Need help configuring Windows Cron Batch file

by rjr, Tuesday, January 22, 2019, 10:12 (1893 days ago) @ jtojnar

Thanks for the quick reply and help.

I now have selfoss working (after fixing pathing issues - with your help) and it appears I can manually add RSS feeds and they will populate correctly.

I will try to figure out how to get the Windows OS batch (cron)working correctly and then when all is working, I'll go back through all the steps and procedures I performed to get selfoss working with XAMPP and post the steps.

Thanks!

Regards,
Ron

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