How to do a every 3 months cron job in laravel?

I am using laravel to schedule a job to run every 3 months at 2am, so I created:

$schedule->command(‘clean:market-history’)->cron( ‘0 0 0,2 ? 1/3 * *’);

But according to my research (by using: this reference) this indicates it will run every 3 months starting in January at 2 am. I got most of it right, I do want it to run every three months at 2 am, but if it starts in January does that not mean if I deploy in august, for example, that it wont start running till January?

Some resources stated to use: */3 how ever, the site, linked above, states the same, starting in January at 2 am.

Is this correct or am I missing something? Can some one explain?

Answers:

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Method 1

If you want to run your command quarterly (First day of Jan, April, July, October) you can use Laravel’s pre-canned quarterly function:

$schedule->command('YourCommandHere')->quarterly('02:00')->timezone('America/New_York');

If you want to run this command every three months starting from time of implementation (ie every 3 months starting now) you can use Laravel’s cron function that lets you pass a custom cron line and that cron line would look like this:

$schedule->command('YourCommandHere')->cron('0 2 * */3 *')->timezone('America/New_York');

You can configure any iteration of laravel’s cron function. Just use the crontab.guru reference I shared below. It’s a lifesaver. Also, don’t forgot to define timezone as I do if you intend on using a different timezone than what the server is set to.

To get all of the Laravel schedule features review this documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/scheduling

My most frequently used url to identify what my cron line should look like: https://crontab.guru

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0