Forgive me if I have misunderstood your question, but it sounds like you are
expecting web2py to start external cron for you. If this is the case, then
that is incorrect. What "external cron" means is a completely separate
process (in this case, the Unix cron scheduler) that needs to run a script.
When running a background task that you would normally use cron for, you can
start this task in a web2py environment so that it can use db, cache, etc.
To do this, you would run using a cron line similar to this (in crontab -e,
for example):
0 9 * * 1-5 python /var/web2py/web2py.py -S app_name -M -J -R
scripts/my_script.py
At 9AM, Monday through Friday, this runs the my_script.py file in your
application's /scripts folder. The -J tells web2py that it is being executed
as a cron job so that it doesn't start Rocket and open up a port needlessly.
This also allows your applications to detect whether a script was executed
by a web request or by a cron script. Why would this be important, you ask?
In one of my applications, I want to force all traffic over SSL, so in my
model, I have this:
############ FORCED SSL #############
from gluon.settings import global_settings
if global_settings.cronjob:
print 'Running as shell script.'
elif not request.is_https:
session.secure()
redirect('https://%s/%s' % (request.env.http_host, request.application))
#####################################
Since trying to redirect a cron script to SSL will fail, I want to check for
that and only force HTTP connections to redirect to use HTTPS.
So to answer your question, you do not pass arguments to mod_wsgi. You start
another web2py instance using -S, -M, and -J options to run a background
process. Hope that helps.
