Avoid using cron for automated updates.

[eschnou]

Setting up a cron job can be tedious for some users. It should be possible to have storytlr update itself without cron. The idea is simple:

• each time a page is hit (robots are helping us on this one)
• we check when was the last update
• if above a delta, we fork an update process

[jmhobbs]

Would we store the last run as a property I assume? What's the best way to start that processing in the background?

[eschnou]

Yes, I advocate using properties as much as possible to avoid adding fields to the schema. It may also be worth one day to add a system_properties table for global settings.

In this case however, we can reuse these two fields in the user table: http://github.com/storytlr/core/blob/master/protected/install/database/schema/core.sql#L451

Or this one in the source table: http://github.com/storytlr/core/blob/master/protected/install/database/schema/core.sql#L286

The trick will be to be smart enough to avoid triggering multiple updates in paralell. The updates themselves could be a fork to execute the update.php script using exec ? http://php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php

[jmhobbs]

I agree with all that, except that some shared hosts run suhosin with the exec family of commands disabled. Should the workaround for that just be "well, then use cron." ?

Any other options? How about a long-poll type XHR?

[eschnou]

Indeed, and since we want to solve the issue exactly for these kind of users, we may need to find other ways. There is also the PHP process functions, on top of which the PHP Multi-threading package is built: http://be.php.net/pcntl_fork - I have never played with this.

Another easier trick may be indeed to add something like Githubissues.

Githubissues is a development platform for aggregating issues.