On the Google Group there has been quite a few threads about the best way to run cron jobs when using CakePHP. This is something I had do for my one of projects and I figured out a very simple way to do it by modifying the dispatcher so controller actions - such as an action to send out a batch of emails - can be invoked from the command line.

It's very simple. What you do is make a copy of index.php in
/app/webroot/, call it cron_dispatcher.php and place it in /app.

Scroll down in the code till you come to the line:-


require CORE_PATH.'cake'.DS.'bootstrap.php';

Now replaces everything below it with the following code:-


// Dispatch the controller action given to it
// eg php cron_dispatcher.php /controller/action
define('CRON_DISPATCHER',true);
if($argc == 2) {
        $Dispatcher= new Dispatcher();
        $Dispatcher->dispatch($argv[1]);
}

What this means is you can call controller actions from the command
line, so for example to call the send action in your mailouts
controller you just create a cron job like this:

php cron_dispatcher.php /mailouts/send

As you can see it's a very simple approach that doesn't break the MVC framework.

Since you are invoking your cron jobs as controller actions it is possible for users to invoke the action from the site proper. If there are certain actions that you don't want users to invoke add a line to the action to check that the constant CRON_DISPATCHER is defined. For example


function send() 
{
    // Check the action is being invoked by the cron dispatcher
    if (!defined('CRON_DISPATCHER')) { $this->redirect('/'); exit(); }

    $this->layout = null; // turn off the layout
    
    // do something here
}