Skip to main content

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/RigbySawGame/ieeEdu_Wen/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

IEE Edu relies on Laravel’s built-in task scheduler to automatically revoke course access when student subscriptions expire. Without the scheduler running, memberships that pass their end_date will remain marked as active in the database and students will continue to have access to subscription-gated content indefinitely. A single crontab entry on your server is all that is needed to activate the entire scheduling system.

​
Required Scheduled Task

The only scheduled command registered in routes/console.php is subscriptions:sync-expired. It is configured to run daily: 
// routes/console.php
Schedule::command('subscriptions:sync-expired')->daily();
When this command runs, it finds all Subscription records where status = 'activa' and end_date < now(), marks them as 'expirada', and calls SubscriptionAccessService::sync() for each affected user to revoke their enrollment access flags. See Artisan Commands for a full breakdown of what the command does internally.

​
Crontab Setup

Laravel’s scheduler works by having a single crontab entry that fires every minute. Laravel itself then decides which registered commands are due to run based on their configured frequency.
1

Open the crontab editor

SSH into your production server and open the crontab for the web server user (commonly www-data, forge, or your deploy user):
crontab -e
2

Add the scheduler entry

Paste the following line, replacing /ruta/al/proyecto with the absolute path to the IEE Edu project root (the directory containing artisan):
* * * * * cd /ruta/al/proyecto && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1
For example, on a typical VPS:
* * * * * cd /var/www/iee-edu && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1
3

Save and exit

Save the file in your editor (:wq in vim, Ctrl+O then Ctrl+X in nano). The crontab is activated immediately — no service restart is required.
The * * * * * pattern fires every minute. Laravel evaluates which registered commands are actually due on each invocation. Since subscriptions:sync-expired is registered with .daily(), Laravel will only execute it once per day (at midnight UTC by default) even though the crontab fires every minute.

​
Verify the Schedule

After adding the crontab entry, confirm that Laravel can see the registered scheduled tasks: 
php artisan schedule:list
You should see output similar to: 
  0 0 * * *  php artisan subscriptions:sync-expired ......... Next Due: 2026-01-16 00:00:00
This confirms the command is registered, shows its cron expression (0 0 * * * = daily at midnight), and displays the next scheduled execution time. To also test that the crontab is firing correctly, you can watch the scheduler log in real time: 
php artisan schedule:work
schedule:work runs the scheduler in the foreground every minute, printing output to the terminal. Use this during local development or staging verification — do not run it as a long-lived process in production (use the crontab there instead).

​
Manual Execution

You can trigger the command outside of the scheduler at any time: 
php artisan subscriptions:sync-expired
This is useful when:
  • You need to immediately revoke access after cancelling a subscription manually in the database.
  • You are verifying a new deployment and want to confirm the command runs without errors before relying on the cron schedule.
  • You are running a post-migration cleanup after importing historical subscription data.

​
Queue Worker (Required for Mail)

The scheduler handles subscription expiry, but email notifications (payment confirmations, enrollment receipts, email verification) are dispatched to the queue. A separate queue worker process must be running for those jobs to be processed.
Start a queue worker in production with:
php artisan queue:work --tries=3
The --tries=3 flag retries a failed job up to three times before moving it to the failed_jobs table. On servers managed with Supervisor or Laravel Forge, configure this command as a persistent daemon so it restarts automatically after a deployment or server reboot.
For local development, the composer dev script starts the queue listener automatically alongside the Vite dev server and the PHP built-in server: 
composer run dev

​
Deployment Checklist

Without the crontab entry in place, subscriptions:sync-expired will never run automatically. Expired subscriptions will not be revoked and students will retain access to all subscription-gated courses past their membership end date. Verify the crontab is present after every new server provision.
After provisioning a new server or re-deploying, confirm the scheduler is wired up correctly:
1

Verify crontab

crontab -l | grep artisan
Confirm the schedule:run line appears in the output.
2

Verify scheduled commands

php artisan schedule:list
Confirm subscriptions:sync-expired is listed with a valid next-run time.
3

Verify queue worker

Check your process manager (Supervisor, Forge, systemd) to confirm php artisan queue:work --tries=3 is running and will be restarted on failure.
4

Run a manual sync

php artisan subscriptions:sync-expired
Confirm the command exits cleanly with either No expired subscriptions found. or a count of synced subscriptions.

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Get started for freeTalk to us