Start scheduled task with WP Cron more often

WordPress Cron

WordPress Cron

WordPress has very useful built-in feature – it could start tasks by schedule. Of course you remember that you can schedule post publication and it will be published at needed time automatically. Thanks to WordPress developers team, this functionality is not limited by WordPress core. You can schedule your task for execution Once, Hourly, Twice a day, Daily. WordPress has public API for that. Look on this WordPress Codex page for your reference. Beautiful! Wonderful! That’s what I really need! But…

But what to do if you need to execute your task more often, than default schedule intervals offered by WordPress? Can you manage WordPress scheduler to start your job every 5 minutes instead of ‘hourly’, ‘twicedaily’ and ‘daily’ intervals?


Yes. I found the answer inside wp_schedule_event() function source code. It is well commented:
"Valid values for the recurrence are hourly, daily and twicedaily. These can be extended using the cron_schedules filter in wp_get_schedules()".

So we can configure any custom time interval for WP Cron task schedule. Look how it could be done:

 add_filter('cron_schedules', 'add_scheduled_interval');
 
  // add once 5 minute interval to wp schedules
  public function add_scheduled_interval($schedules) {
 
    $schedules['minutes_5'] = array('interval'=>300, 'display'=>'Once 5 minutes');
 
    return $schedules;
  }

We just added new ‘minutes_5’ interval (300 seconds = 60 * 5 = 5 minutes) to the list of WP Cron schedule intervals and can use it to schedule new WP Cron job.
Let’s do the final step – setup our cron job to be executed every 5 minutes:

  if (!wp_next_scheduled('your_cron_hook_name_here')) {
    wp_schedule_event(time(), 'minutes_5', 'your_cron_hook_name_here');
  }
  add_action('your_cron_hook_name_here', 'your_task_executor');
 
  function your_task_executor() {
    // some code to execute by schedule here
 
  }

For additional reading I offer you to pay attention of these very useful tutorials related to WP Cron:

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