Fragmented Thought

InMotion hosting cron ping

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Published:

Lance Gliser

Heads up! This content is more than six months old. Take some time to verify everything still works as expected.

I had a bit of trouble today getting cron working for a client's website today. They are hosted at by InMotion Hosting. In theory, cron should be simple, but not there. There's a bit of trick you'll need. The official documentation on cron jobs for InMotion Hosting is at https://support.inmotionhosting.com/cgi-bin/kb.cgi?do=read&id=49. But, it's flat wrong. It's missing one very important piece of information...

curl -A 'Cron Curl V1' http://www.example.com/cron.php

The difference from their documentation? Without declaring a user agent using curl -A, websites may not be able to correctly respond to the request. This is evident in the Drupal logs, as you will see a repeated entry for "page not found" and message "406.shtml".