CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

The depends a bit on whether you're asking the question as an administrator (who wants to change the policy on one server) or an extension-developer (who wants to change the default for all deployments).

ADMINISTRATOR: You can turn off the basic scheduler built into Civi and setup more nuanced scheduling directly in crontab, e.g.

1. Navigate to "Administer => System Settings => Scheduled Job" find the job you care about. (It sounds like "Update Membership Statuses" is the one in question.) Note the "API entity" and API action" (e.g. "Job" and "process_membership"). Disable the job.

2. On the webserver, add a new crontab entry like:

30 0 * * * cd /var/www/drupal; drush cvapi job.process_membership

EXTENSION DEVELOPER: There's no decisive answer, but there are a few options.

• Modify your cronjob so that it runs hourly (instead of daily) and then update the logic to check if the current hour is 0. If it's any other hour, then just return without doing any work (e.g. "if ($currentHour != 0) return;"). This is simplest but could be problematic in edge-cases where site-admins want to change the schedule.
• As above, modify your cronjob to run hourly. Additionally, add a new setting that stores the timestamp of the last run. Write your own logic to read/update the setting and make a decision about whether to proceed. This is a bit more complicated but can handle edge-cases better.
• Implement hook_civicrm_cron. This hook fires everytime Civi's scheduler runs. One can use this hook to replace the built-in scheduler with a more advanced one (e.g. like the Drupal community did with elysia_cron and ultimate_cron). This would be a bigger task and would merit a new/separate extension.
• Prepare a patch to the built-scheduler which adds the option of managing the hour.