Multisite cron from command line (eg. crontab)

[Grezvany13]

For a project I'm working on we needed a way to run wp-cron.php for multiple blogs on a network, while using crontab to run the cron at a fixed interval.

However we found the issue that we not only had to call wp-cron.php for every single blog, but also were forced to use either wget or cURL to make sure every blog got called separately.

To fix this issue I've build a replacement for wp-cron.php, currently called wp-cron-multi.php which allows us to have a single cron (in crontab), but checks all transients on all blogs which are active.

It does allow/require some arguments, so it works perfectly in multiple situation (like usage of $_SERVERHTTP_HOST? and custom path to the WP core).

Personally I think this would be a nice addition to the WP core, either to replace the current wp-cron.php file or as an addition to the current method.

A gist with the code can be found at ​https://gist.github.com/Grezvany13/35384a7855d544c7fed7

[dd32]

I feel this is probably best left to 3rd party tools, such as the tool you've written up, or something such as ​Cavalcade by Human Made which handles wp cron entries differently.

Once you pass a certain threshold, having to add individual tasks or having the script process all sites on the network just isn't going to scale.

[jeremyfelt]

Agreed. Once things scale to the point where special cron handling is necessary, there are better ways to handle it—with a jobs system—rather than via WordPress core itself. I think we're better off leaving this at the plugin level.