Cron jobs

Speaking of cron jobs, it is worth noting one important thing. A Magento cron job is not the same as an operating system cron job. An operating system cron is driven by a crontab (short for cron table) file. The crontab file, is a configuration file that specifies shell commands that need to be run periodically on a given schedule.

A Magento cron job is driven by a periodic execution of PHP code that handles entries in the cron_schedule table. The cron_schedule table is where Magento cron jobs are queued once they are picked up from the individual crontab.xml file.

The Magento cron jobs cannot be executed without the operating system cron job being set to execute the php bin/magento cron:run command. Ideally, an operating system cron job should be set to trigger Magento's cron:run every minute. Magento will then internally execute its cron jobs according to the way an individual cron job is defined in the crontab.xml file.

To define a new cron job in Magento cron, we first need to...