Question

Setting up a cron job to download a file daily

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?

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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