Yes, that’s a nice capistrano recipe, though, so far I use a simple Git hook script for deployment purposes.

It is simply a way to define cron jobs from within your application. Conceptually it sits on top of crontab, so it adds more “overhead” ;-)

The reason I prefer whenever over manually editing the crontab is the nice syntax and that I have the definition of the cronjobs in my application. And by using whenever in my deployment script I no longer have to care about the crontab, it is always up-to-date.

Does this actually eliminate any overhead, or just provide a manner to create Cron tabs from within code. I guess I am asking why not jump to crontab -e and enter the result.

I’m not aware of any alternatives in CakePHP. However, as long as you have Ruby on your server (Rails is not required), you should be able to use “whenever” with CakePHP. The only “restriction” is that you have to use “command” when defining the jobs. But else it should work. Give it a try ;-)