Set up a custom cron job and cron group

These topics discuss how to set up a custom cron job and optionally a custom cron group. If your Magento extension requires scheduled tasks to run periodically, you can use these topics to set up a cron job (the scheduled task) and optionally a cron group (which runs custom tasks at the same time).

If you use a Magento-provided cron group, you don’t have to define a custom cron group; however, if you want your cron jobs to run at a different schedule or you want them all to run together, you should define a cron group

The Magento application provides the following cron groups:

• default, which contains most cron jobs
• index, which refreshes indexers
• These topics are available in Magento Commerce only
  • staging, which runs Staging-related tasks
  • catalog_event, which runs tasks for target and shopping cart rules

See the following topics for details:

• Custom cron job and cron group reference
• Configure a custom cron job and cron group (tutorial)