Scheduled Tasks

Scheduled tasks (cron jobs)

Some things in FreeITSM cannot happen while somebody is looking at a screen. An SLA breaches at 3am. A contract expires in 30 days. A developer comments on a Jira issue and nobody is watching. For those, FreeITSM needs a small job that wakes up on a timer.

None of them are set up for you. A fresh install has no scheduled tasks at all, and the features that depend on them fail silently — nothing errors, nothing appears in a log, the feature simply never happens. This page lists every one, what breaks without it, and how to set it up on Windows and Linux.

⚠️ Silent is the important word. A tracker whose status never changes looks exactly like a tracker where nothing has happened. An SLA that never breaches looks like good service. If a time-based feature "doesn't seem to work", check this page first.

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The five jobs

Job	What it does	What breaks without it	Suggested interval
cron/integration_poll.php	Asks Jira (and other issue trackers) what has changed	Issue status never updates and comments never come back — see Issue trackers	every 5 minutes
cron/sla_breach_check.php	Checks open tickets against their SLA targets	SLA warning and breach notifications are never sent	every 5 minutes
cron/webhook_deliveries.php	Delivers queued outbound webhooks, with retries	Webhooks fired by workflows sit in the queue and never send	every 1 minute
cron/workflow_scheduled.php	Fires time-based workflow triggers	Rules like "this contract expires in 30 days" never run	every 5 minutes
cron/attachment_extract.php	Reads the text out of PDFs and scanned documents so they can be searched	Nothing immediately — see the note below	every 5 minutes

The first four each have a detailed setup document in the docs/ folder of the application: integration-poll-cron-setup.md, sla-cron-setup.md, webhook-cron-setup.md and workflow-scheduled-cron-setup.md.

The attachment job is the odd one out, deliberately. It is the only one whose absence is not silent failure. Without it, waiting documents are still read — a few at a time, whenever somebody is using FreeITSM — so attachment searching works on an installation with no scheduled tasks at all. The job just keeps up with a busy service desk rather than trickling. Both behaviours can be turned off in Tickets → Settings → Indexing, and neither does anything until a document reader is set up under System → Integrations → Apache Tika. See Attachment text extraction.

Which do I actually need?

Only the ones matching the features you use. If you have no issue tracker connected, the tracker poll does nothing useful. If you have never written a workflow, the scheduled-workflow job has nothing to fire. If in doubt, set them all up — an unused job costs a second of CPU and prints one line saying it had nothing to do.

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Windows (Task Scheduler)

Run these in a Command Prompt opened as Administrator. Adjust the two paths if your PHP or FreeITSM lives elsewhere.

schtasks /create /tn "FreeITSM Tracker Poll" /tr "C:\wamp64\bin\php\php8.4.0\php.exe C:\wamp64\www\freeitsm-app\cron\integration_poll.php" /sc minute /mo 5 /ru SYSTEM

schtasks /create /tn "FreeITSM SLA Breach Check" /tr "C:\wamp64\bin\php\php8.4.0\php.exe C:\wamp64\www\freeitsm-app\cron\sla_breach_check.php" /sc minute /mo 5 /ru SYSTEM

schtasks /create /tn "FreeITSM Webhooks" /tr "C:\wamp64\bin\php\php8.4.0\php.exe C:\wamp64\www\freeitsm-app\cron\webhook_deliveries.php" /sc minute /mo 1 /ru SYSTEM

schtasks /create /tn "FreeITSM Scheduled Workflows" /tr "C:\wamp64\bin\php\php8.4.0\php.exe C:\wamp64\www\freeitsm-app\cron\workflow_scheduled.php" /sc minute /mo 5 /ru SYSTEM

schtasks /create /tn "FreeITSM Attachment Text" /tr "C:\wamp64\bin\php\php8.4.0\php.exe C:\wamp64\www\freeitsm-app\cron\attachment_extract.php" /sc minute /mo 5 /ru SYSTEM

Things that catch people out on Windows

• If either path contains a space, the command above will fail. Put the whole thing in a .bat file and point the task at that instead — far easier than fighting schtasks quoting.
• /ru SYSTEM tasks are invisible to a normal user. Task Scheduler run without elevation will not list them, and neither will PowerShell's Get-ScheduledTask. Open Task Scheduler as administrator to see them. A task you cannot see is not necessarily a task that does not exist.
• Last Run Result of 0x41303 means "has not run yet" — normal for a task you have just created. It should become 0x0 after its first run.
• Check the task is Enabled, not merely present. A disabled task sits in the list looking perfectly healthy.

Linux (cron)

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/freeitsm-app/cron/integration_poll.php    >/dev/null 2>&1
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/freeitsm-app/cron/sla_breach_check.php    >/dev/null 2>&1
*   * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/freeitsm-app/cron/webhook_deliveries.php  >/dev/null 2>&1
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/freeitsm-app/cron/workflow_scheduled.php  >/dev/null 2>&1
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/freeitsm-app/cron/attachment_extract.php  >/dev/null 2>&1

Drop the >/dev/null while you are testing, so cron emails you the output.

Running one by hand

Useful for testing, or before you have set the schedule up. From the application folder:

php cron/integration_poll.php

Each job prints what it did. The tracker poll, for example:

Jira                         checked   1, changed  0
    comments: 1 seen, 1 imported

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Checking they are working

The most reliable test is not "does the task exist" but "did something happen that only the job could have caused".

• Tracker poll — change an issue's status in Jira, wait for two intervals, and see whether the pill on the linked ticket follows.
• Webhooks — fire a workflow that sends one, then check the delivery queue empties.
• SLA — the notification arrives, or it does not.

💡 Each job refuses to run more often than a minimum interval, and each connection has its own interval too. So running a job twice in quick succession may print "No connections due" or "Rate limited". That is the job protecting itself, not a fault — wait and run it again.

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What is not a scheduled task

Worth knowing, so you do not go looking for a job that does not exist — or create one that should not.

• Incoming email. Mailboxes are checked by the browser while an analyst has the ticket list open, not by a scheduled job. Mail therefore arrives when somebody is working, which is usually what you want, but it does mean nothing is collected overnight with every browser closed.
• Snoozed tickets waking up. There is no job. A snoozed ticket reappears because the snooze time has passed — it is read from the clock whenever the folder is drawn.
• InTune synchronisation. scripts/intune_worker.php and intune_app_worker.php look like cron jobs but are not. The application starts them itself when you run a sync. Do not schedule them.

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See also: Installation · Issue trackers (Jira) · Workflows · Webhooks