Cron for Windows

Wanted to deploy an application on a Windows server. The application had features that would work only if cron was setup to call a particular php page at fixed intervals. Doing this on Linux is a job of two minutes. But I did not know how to do cron on Windows. And this is something that I have not even bothered to find out for years!

Always told people that you should be on Linux if you want such features. Windows is not acceptable 🙂

And if the client persisted, we did a SQL server job setup or Windows Scheduled Task feature!

Today I thought otherwise. Thought I must find some cron replacement for Windows. Couple of searches later, I found pycron. It’s a great free solution for setting up crons just the way you would do on Linux. Comes also with a GUI!

So next time you want to setup a cron on Windows, try out pycron!

Update, I also think z-cron is another great (and free) alternative. It does a lot, including executing web urls.