Old Release
This documentation relates to an old version of DSpace, version 4.x. Looking for another version? See all documentation.
This DSpace release is end-of-life and is no longer supported.
Several DSpace features require that a script is run regularly (via cron, or similar). Some of these features include:
- the e-mail subscription feature that alerts users of new items being deposited;
- the 'media filter' tool, that generates thumbnails of images and extracts the full-text of documents for indexing;
- the 'checksum checker' that tests the bitstreams in your repository for corruption;
- the sitemap generator, which builds compact lists of content to lessen the load created by search engine indexing.
These regularly scheduled tasks should be setup via either cron (for Linux/Mac OSX) or Windows Task Scheduler (for Windows).
Recommended Cron Settings
If you are on Linux or Mac OSX, you should add these cron settings under the OS account which is running DSpace (or Tomcat). For example, login as that user and type the following to edit the user's crontab.
crontab -e
While every DSpace installation is unique, in order to get the most out of DSpace, we highly recommend enabling these basic cron settings (the settings are described below):
################## # GLOBAL VARIABLES ################## # Full path of your local DSpace Installation (e.g. /home/dspace or /dspace or similar) # MAKE SURE TO CHANGE THIS VALUE!!! DSPACE = [dspace] # Shell to use SHELL=/bin/sh # Add all major 'bin' directories to path PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin # Set JAVA_OPTS with defaults for DSpace Cron Jobs. # Only provides 512MB of memory by default (which should be enough for most sites). But, feel free to increase as needed to give more memory. JAVA_OPTS="-Xmx512M -Xms512M -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8" ############## # HOURLY TASKS (Recommended to be run multiple times per day, if possible) # At a minimum these tasks should be run daily. ############## # Regenerate DSpace Sitemaps every 8 hours (12AM, 8AM, 4PM). # SiteMaps ensure that your content is more findable in Google, Google Scholar, and other major search engines. 0 0,8,16 * * * $DSPACE/bin/dspace generate-sitemaps > /dev/null ################ # DAILY TASKS (Recommended to be run once per day. Feel free to tweak the scheduled times below.) ################ # Send out subscription e-mails at 01:00 every day # This sends an email to any users who have "subscribed" to a Collection, notifying them of newly added content. 0 1 * * * [dspace]/bin/dspace sub-daily # Run the media filter at 02:00 every day. # This task ensures that thumbnails are generated for newly add images, # and also ensures full text search is available for newly added PDF/Word/PPT/HTML documents 0 2 * * * [dspace]/bin/dspace filter-media # Run the checksum checker at 03:00 0 3 * * * [dspace]/bin/dspace checker -lp # Mail the results to the sysadmin at 04:00 0 4 * * * [dspace]/bin/dspace checker-emailer -c
(TIM IS WORKING ON THIS)