00:00: This guide will show you how to set up and manage CRON jobs, or scheduled tasks on the Scout platform.

00:06: After logging into cloudabove.com and opening up your Scout control panel you will see your sites listed like this.

00:13: Click the Settings cog beside the site you wish to manage.

00:17: Navigate to the "Tasks" section.

00:20: On this page we can see a section which lets us create Scheduled Tasks, also known as CRON jobs.

00:26: The first choice is a drop-down menu which lets you select the frequency of which the task will be run.

00:32: Examples include: Every Minute. Every Five Minutes. Twice per hour. Every Hour. Or once a day.

00:40: The next section is the kind of action you are looking to perform, for example: Run a PHP Script. Fetch a URL. Or Custom.

00:49: The last section is where we enter in the path of the script we wish to run on schedule, or it might be a URL we're choosing to fetch etc. You should enter in the full path to the script where possible, this includes the Username of your site.

01:02: If your not sure what your website's Username is then you can check it by looking on the left hand side here.

01:08: In my case my website's username is Poldice, so here I enter in the following path to my script. In most cases the path structure on Scout will be: Forward slash, home, forward slash, username, forward slash, site, forward slash public underscore html, forward slash and then the name of the script you wish to execute.

01:29: When things are setup correctly press the "Add Task" button.

01:33: We now see our scheduled task listed, and on the right hand side of it we see additional options. We have the ability to update or adjust the command.

01:42: The scheduled task can be paused at anytime by pressing the pause button

01:46: And then resumed again with ease.

01:49: The notification bell button will pause or resume email notifications about this scheduled task. By default Scout mutes email notifications for CRON jobs, but if you want to you can selectively enable email notifications to see the output or results from the task. The contents of the email will only ever be what the script you're executing returned, it is worth remembering that a lot of automation web scripts, when executed successfully, do their work and then output nothing, so they would not trigger an email notification in that case.

02:18: But if the script was not completing successfully and it was producing errors, then those errors would be emailed to the account owner if you click on this notification bell.

02:27: Lastly the Delete button removes the scheduled task and stops it from running in future.

02:32: The Scout Platform loves automation, scheduled tasks or CRON jobs help to automate our websites and keep things running smoothly. Scout was handcrafted with love by our cloud above team in Cornwall. If you have any feedback or suggestions then we would love to hear from you.