Featured AI Products
Compute
Build, deploy, and scale cloud compute resources
Containers and Images
Safely store and manage containers and backups
Managed Databases
Fully managed resources running popular database engines
Management and Dev Tools
Control infrastructure and gather insights
Networking
Secure and control traffic to apps
Security
Help protect your account and resources with these security features
Storage
Store and access any amount of data reliably in the cloud
Browse all products
AI/ML
CMS
Data and IoT
Developer Tools
Gaming and Media
Hosting
Security and Networking
Startups and SMBs
Web and App Platforms
See all solutions
Community
Documentation
Developer Tools
Get Involved
Utilities and Help
Become a Partner
Marketplace
Pricing

- Community
- DigitalOcean
- Community
- DigitalOcean

Setting up a cron job to download a file daily

Posted on February 6, 2017

Linux Basics

Linux Commands

Apache

Ubuntu

By Ken Savage

I need to download a file each day at 8am EST from a server. I’d like to download it into my droplet daily. How do I go about setting this up for my developer? I’m reading that crontab is how I do this?

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Jonathan Tittle

February 7, 2017

Accepted Answer

@kensavage

You can use crontab by running:

crontab -e

Then paste in your cron-specific command, such as:

0 8 * * * /usr/bin/wget http://domain.com/file.tar.gz -O /path/to/file.tar.gz

The above command will download the file file.tar.gz and store it to /path/to/file.tar.gz. You will need to create the storage directory beforehand, though. The command won’t create it for you, so you could run:

mkdir -p /path/to

You can also change the file name and add a date if you need to keep previous versions.

0 8 * * * /usr/bin/wget http://domain.com/file.tar.gz -O /path/to/file_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S).tar.gz

Which would produce a file name such as file_20161014_091953.tar.gz

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

View all products

Start building today

From GPU-powered inference and Kubernetes to managed databases and storage, get everything you need to build, scale, and deploy intelligent applications.