I have written my web application in PHP using CakePHP framework, and I need to reuse part of the code in a scheduled job for data extraction. To avoid coding in other language, I was trying to see if it is possible for me to use PHP and CakePHP to run a scheduled job.

To do this in CakePHP is pretty straightforward. I used CakePHP 1.2, and Cake shell is under cake\console directory, and my custom Cake shell is under cake\console\libs directory.

A simple example of a Cake shell.

<?php

class MyCustomShell extends Shell {
    var $tasks = array('Project', 'DbConfig',
                 'Model', 'Controller', 'View', 'Plugin');
    var $txnController = null;

    function initialize() {
       $this->_loadModels();
    }

    function main() {
	App::import('Controller', 'Txns');
	$this->txnController = new TxnsController();
	$this->txnController->loadHistoricalData();
    }

    function help() {
        $this->out('Script to load information');

    }
}
?>

As you can see, my custom shell extends Shell class. $tasks variable is needed since I need to load my CakePHP models and controllers. In main function, I used App::import to import TxnsController so that I can instantiate the class. To load extra model and component, you need to use App::import also, e.g. App::import(’Model’, ‘Txn’) to load Txn model, and App::import(’Component’, ‘Email’) to load the EmailComponent.

To run the console program, I use the script provided by CakePHP to run it.

# <cake_dir>/cake/console/cake my_custom

I can then schedule this command to be run in the interval that I want.