# miniCal Cron Setup

Cron is how miniCal does the scheduling time-based tasks. Several miniCal core features, such as checking for updates and getting bookings from OTA's like Booking, Airbnb, and Expedia, utilize Cron.

#### Understanding of miniCal Cron Scheduling

miniCal provides hooks to perform the cron job. Use any given action name and add your call-back function.\
Right now, the default intervals provided by miniCal are:

* **hourly-cron**
* **daily-cron**

Hourly-cron runs from the 0th hour to the 23rd hour a day, for example, if you have an OTA connection and you want your booking updated at every hour, then you can use this hourly-cron job.\
The same goes for the daily-cron; if you want to mail you the daily booking list at any specific time, you can use daily-cron for this.

#### Why Use Cron

* miniCal core and many extensions need a scheduling system to perform time-based tasks. However, many hosting services are shared and do not provide access to the system scheduler.
* miniCal makes sure that the job is done on the next page load if the job is not done.

#### How to Use Cron

```php
// daily cron
add_action('daily-cron', 'your_callback_function', 10, 1);
function your_callback_function($data) {
  // this code will be executed on 0th hour every day
}

// hourly
add_action('hourly-cron', 'your_callback_function', 10, 1);
function your_callback_function($data) {
  // this code will be executed on 0th to 23rd hour every day
}
```