Cronjobs

There are some maintenance jobs that should be done at regular intervals to keep the instance running smoothly:

• Old, abandoned uploads should be deleted from the database to free up the space of the temporary GPX files.

• Tracks that are not present in the cache should have their cache entry populated by pre-calculating their length/uphill/downhill/… values. This makes accessing those values faster when a user requests the track’s details.

• If enabled, heatmaps/tilehunts should be generated.

Fietsboek comes with a script to deal with those jobs: fietscron. You can run it like this:

fietscron -c path_to_config.ini

The script is designed to be “smart”, meaning that it splits the long tasks (such as heatmap generation) over multiple runs, and it should work without additional configuration.

You can use any mechanism you like to run this command at pre-defined intervals (e.g. once an hour). You can find information about this in various sources, depending on your system setup:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Timers

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Cron

• https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Cron

For example, the classic cron-way to run fietscron once per hour would be to add the following to your crontab (using crontab -e):

0 * * * * /path/to/venv/bin/fietscron -c /path/to/settings.ini