This should spell it out for us with screenshots: How to setup a cron job – Virtualmin and there should probably be a help link (possibly linking to that page) under :10000/cron/?xnavigation=1
on the picture it seems you set it to run every first minute in every hour (not every minute)
When I read the comment I looked back carefully at the image and thought “no, that’s wrong”, and dismissed that thread. Later when I read in some random discussion (after looking through dozens of search results) how to check the logs (/var/log/syslog or webmin → system → system logs viewer), I saw that the commenter is correct.
But I still can’t figure out what the right setting should be. I tried putting “0” for hour since that seems to be the only other reasonable option, yet that didn’t work either.
EDIT:
Oh my. To get it to run every 5 minutes we probably have to ctrl+click “5, 10, 15, etc.” under the “minutes” section. Geez. No wonder that guy felt it is tedious.
Possible fixes:
As mentioned above, provide some help text/link.
Allow us to paste in the raw code: */5 * * * * php /home/AdminUser/public_html/scheduled.php > /dev/null 2>&1
Or maybe that’s what “Input to command” does? There should really be some help tooltips.
That’s probably not a bad idea. Although if you know how to write a cron expression, then maybe just open a terminal and run crontab -e.
But then again, maybe a user account doesn’t have shell access. Or maybe the user is copying and pasting and doesn’t fully understand what they’re doing.
In either case, being able to paste the expression (or the whole command), with a confirmation screen that interprets the command for the user and asks them to confirm that that’s what they really want to happen, might indeed be a usability improvement.
Another point regarding “terminal vs pasting in raw code” - I did open what I thought to be a terminal into my virtualmin instance (using that person’s directions) but it still said I had no existing file/crons:
Since you’re opening crontab for the first time, you will be asked to select an editor. Select nano text editor as it’s the easiest to use from the bunch.
Even though I had already set some up via the UI. So that confused me further, and I didn’t continue with the commands.
It says “/tmp/crontab.B6U5jQ/crontab” at the top, and I couldn’t find that in the virtualmin file manager.
As the file location suggests it is a temporary file so you will never find it as it is removed when crontab closes . Post up the contents of your crontab so we can see what is going on
