CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm going through the Floss manual to better understand the system configuration for civiMail - this isn't academic, we're about to send out an important mailing and I want to get things right.

http://en.flossmanuals.net/CiviCRM/SystemConfiguration

I'm  finding it difficult to understand  and would appreciate some additional help - currently confused over scheduling...


quoting the manual: 'Create an account dedicated to this task (e.g., mailprocess), give it a long, secure password (e.g.,seol-lzprm42amv-psyc) and grant it access on CiviCRM and CiviMail.'

• Does this mean setup a linux user or setup a drupal user or both? I understand that cron jobs are set up for specific linux users, and I also understand that that the php script needs to run as a CMS user that has access to civiCRM and the mailing groups concerned, but what I don't understand is what it means to grant a linux user access to CiviCRM and CiviMail or Drupal - does it mean that you set up a Drupal user with the same username and password as the linux user?
• Why not set up the cronjob using a control panel such as DirectAdmin or cpanel?
• Alternatively why not edit the /etc/crontab file rather than adding to a specific user's crontab - after all no users other than the www-data user is going to be logging in to run cron else it wouldn't be automation
• why not use an existing Drupal user's credentials to run the php script?

After giving one example of what to enter after $cron -e, the manual then goes on to give a different script  (quoted below)

• Is this still the crontab for the user created above?
• What is the MAILTO line doing there?
• What tells the www-data user to run the script?
• it appears that there is no need to specify the site key when running from the cli only when using wget or curl - is that correct or an omission?

Quote:

# This must be set to the directory where civicrm is installed.
CIVI_ROOT=/var/www/civicrm
USER=www-data
MAILTO="you@example.org"
# Location of the PHP Command Line Interface binary. nice -19 forces to run at a
lower priority than the web server
PHP=nice -n19 /usr/bin/php

#line to be modified according to the informations below
PARAMS= -sdefault -umailprocess -pseol-lzprm42amv-psyc
#cronjob send
# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/5 * * * * cd $CIVI_ROOT;$PHP  bin/civimail.cronjob.php $PARAMS
*/15 * * * * cd $CIVI_ROOT;$PHP bin/EmailProcessor.php $PARAMS'