scheduled http call on AWS elastic beanstalk - codeigniter

Question

I've been searching for a while and think I have part of the information I need but just need some assistance putting it all together.
What I'm trying to achieve is to call a URL (a codeigniter controller) on a regular basis e.g. every 5 minutes which will go through my database mail queue and send the mail using amazon SES.
So far I have successfully created the controller, model, DB and SES is working just fine. The controller sends 10 emails at a time and it all works fine when I manually hit the URL.
I'm not too familiar with cron jobs, but think this is where I need to head.
My application is set up on Elastic beanstalk on AWS.
I think that I need a folder called .ebextensions in my web root, with a file called something.config in it, where I can put some 'container commands'. I also think I will need to include 'leader_only: true' in there somewhere to avoid my replicated instances doing the same jobs.
When I don't understand is what should my container command be, considering controller is 'http://myapplication/process_mail' ? From examples I've seen I couldn't see how it determines the frequency, or even the code that 'calls' the URL.
In my controller, I previously had the following code to ensure it could only be called from the command line. Is this something I can keep and have or will the container command just hit the URL like any other user?
if (!$this->input->is_cli_request()) {
echo "Access Denied";
return;
}
Thanks in advance for any help at all. I think i just need help with what should go in the config file, but then again I may have gone down completely the wrong path altogether!
UPDATE:
So far I've got as far as this:
I believe i need to run the application from the commandline like this http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/general/cli.html
so my command would be php index.php process_mail
So what I actually need is help with running this command evey 5 minutes. This is what I have so far:
container_commands:
send_mail:
command: php index.php process_mail
leader_only: true
But what I don't understand is how I get this to run every 5 minutes, rather than just when the instance is set up. Do I need to create a cron job file on instance creation, with the php command in it instead?
Update 2:
To anyone else with the same problem, i got this sorted in the end like this:
an ebextensions file that looks like this: (.ebextensions/mail_queue.config)
container_commands:
01_send_mail:
command: "cat .ebextensions/process_mail.txt > /etc/cron.d/process_mail && chmod 644 /etc/cron.d/process_mail"
leader_only: true
a file called process_mail.txt in the same folder that looks like this:
# The newline at the end of this file is extremely important. Cron won't run without it.
*/5 * * * * root /usr/bin/php /var/app/current/index.php process_mail > /dev/null
So, every 5 minutes it runs via the cmd line the codeigniter main index file, passing in the controller name.
thanks to this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/15233848/2604392

Answer 1

I would set up the cron job to talk to the url, then store result in a MySQL database. Then regular PHP or any other app can connect to MySQL and access the data. That's the suggested way to connect to Twitter since a few months, so you can find info on how to do this floowing search for Twitter connectivity.
Hope this helps
By the way, while writing an email generating PHP script, I noticed that I have to slow down the pace of email sending to avoid being flagged as spammer. I added a delay of 2 seconds between emails and it did the job. My database was only 2500 so no big deal (except taking care of changing the PHP_MAXEXECUTION time variable)...