Scheduled harvesting

[fredriley]

HI all

This is a Q I think I already know the answer for, but I'll try it anyway: is there a way to set Harvester to re-harvest/refresh selected archives on schedule? Looking at the documentation it appears that you can only re-harvest manually via the admin interface, or via the command line. I had a quick search on this forum for "harvesting" and there was a thread on "automated harvesting" (http://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1624&p=5016) but it wasn't relevant to the Q as far as I could see.

I strongly suspect that the answer is to set up a cron job to run the command on a daily/weekly/whatever basis, which if your sysadmin allows users to run cron jobs is simple enough. The problem arises when this is barred to ordinary users, as is the case at my university, or when Harvester is hosted on a Windoze box, as is the case with a test installation I've got going.

Cheers

Fred

[asmecher]

Hi Fred,

I'm afraid Cron is the answer -- you need to somehow invoke:

Code: Select all

php tools/harvest.php all from=last

Without some server-based periodic execution tool, you may be able to cobble together something in PHP, but I don't think it'll be very reliable. (There is a generic plugin called "acron" in the OCS2 CVS tree that you may be able to port over, but I haven't tried it myself.)

I'm sure there is something similar to Cron on the windows platform, but I'm not familiar enough with Windows administration to suggest where to find it.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[fredriley]

Thanks, Alec - I figured that would likely be the case, but just wanted to be sure before I hassled our sysadmin.

Fred