Better scheduling of activity emails
May 9, 2017
With a new console command in the upcoming Nextcloud 12 it is possible to send out the activity emails more regularly than before.
In certain scenarios it makes sense to send the activity emails out more regularly, e.g. you want to send the hourly emails always at the full hour, daily emails before people start to work in the morning and weekly mails shall be send on monday morning, so people can read up when starting into the week.
Therefor in Nextcloud 12 a console command was added to allow sending those emails intentionally. This allows to set up special cron jobs on your server with the known granularity, instead of relying on the Nextcloud cron feature which is not very flexible on scheduling.
To implement the samples mentioned above, the following three entries are necessary:
# crontab -u www-data -e
0 * * * * php -f /var/www/nextcloud/occ activity:send-mails hourly
30 7 * * * php -f /var/www/nextcloud/occ activity:send-mails daily
30 7 * * MON php -f /var/www/nextcloud/occ activity:send-mails weekly
If you want to manually send out all activity emails which are queued, you can run
occ activity:send-mails
without any argument.