How to use "poor man's cron" with PHP?

Question

I'm trying to implement a "poor man's cron" to run my PHP script only every 10 minutes (if no one visits the page it doesn't run until someone does)

Here is what I have:

$current_time = time();



if($current_time >= $last_run + (60 * 10)) {

    echo 'foo';

    $last_run = time();

} else {

    echo 'bar';

}

What I'm expecting to get is "foo" on the screen once and when I refresh the page I want to see "bar". If I refresh the page after 10 minutes it should be "foo" again for once and then "bar" until another 10 minutes has passed.

Currently it prints out "foo" all the time.

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Answer 1

Variables don't hold their value after execution finishes. All memory is cleared when the PHP script finishes, meaning the next time the script is run, PHP will not know what $last_run was. You need to store $last_run somehow, possibly using the filesystem or database.

Using the filesystem, you could do:

$last_run = file_get_contents('lastrun.txt');
if (!$last_run || $current_time >= $last_run + (60 * 10)) {
   echo 'foo';
   file_put_contents('lastrun.txt', time());
} else {
    echo 'bar';
}

How to use "poor man's cron" with PHP?

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