How to run Shell in background from controller and update database on execution in CakePHP - shell

Question

I am working on CakePHP 3.4 project.
I have to execute some command to scan through the files and directories of a particular directory.
This might take long time depending on the size of the directory, therefore I want to run it in background and mark running label in view until it executed successfully.
How can I run a Shell Task in the background from Controller and update database on execution?
I'm new to Shell tasks.

Answer 1

Your thinking along good lines about running this in the background if it is a time consuming task. You will need to use some form of queuing system that allows you to add jobs to a queue that can then get run in the background by running the queue from a cronjob. Take a look at the Queue plugin for doing this.
You'll basically need to create a queue task that contains the functionality that you need running in the background and then add a job to the queue that will run that task in the background. The Queue plugin's documentation shows how to do this and there are a load of example queue tasks included with the plugin.
If you need to indicate the status of the queued job you could save the job's ID in a session and check if it is complete when loading a page.

Answer 2

You can dispatch a Shell task from the controller. If you want to run this in the background you could, for example, run this controller action via JavaScript/Ajax.
// maybe this task runs looooong
set_time_limit(0);
$shell = new ShellDispatcher();
$output = $shell->run(['cake', 'bake', 'model', 'Products']);
if ($output === 0) {
$this->Flash->success('Yep!');
} else {
$this->Flash->error('Nope!');
}
But you could indeed have googled this at least. ;-)
EDIT Forget this one, go for drmonkeyninja’s answer.