Help: Setup a Cron

If you want to use recurring invoices you have to setup a cron that opens the URL listed on the recurring invoices page. A cron is basically a script that runs on predefined times. You can setup a cron that runs every minute, every third hour per day or yearly. For recurring invoices you should run the cron daily.

There are two different ways on how to setup a cron:

• use you own web server or
• use an online service that runs the cron for you.

Use your own Server  

As there are various different types of operating software for web servers (e.g. Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows Server or even Mac OSX Server) there is not one tutorial on how to setup a cron. Because of this we listed tutorials for the most used systems below and wrote an example for Unix-based operating systems.

• Ubuntu
• CentOS
• Windows Server (2008)

Example for Unix-based systems

Open the crontab file with crontab -e and paste the following line:

0 0 * * * wget -O - https://yoursite.com/invoices/cron/recur/your-cron-key >/dev/null 2>&1

where yoursite.com is the domain you use for InvoicePlane and your-cron-key the cron key from your settings.

Use an Online Service  

There are a lot of online services that offer running a cron for you, for example cron-job.org, FastCron or any other.
Please read the documentation of the service you use to know how to setup a cron with their system.