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Unsubscribed User
Courses Plus Student 114 PointsRun .js file every 15. minute
I have a .js file that is on my web-page. It is scraping another web-page and if the information is edited I do something. My problem is that I don't know to to run the javascript file. I know how to do it with a php-script, with cron-jobs, but I can't find a way for javascript, so my question is:
Is it possible to run a .js file from php?
Is there a service like cron-job for javascript(only free services)
6 Answers

Max Dubinin
12,807 PointsNo. What you're talking about is a thread. You'll need a server for that. If you want to implement that in JS then read about Node.js multithreading

Max Dubinin
12,807 PointsThere is an entire course about node.js here on treehouse and I strongly recommend it

Unsubscribed User
Courses Plus Student 114 PointsDoes that show how to use it on my own web-page to?

Max Dubinin
12,807 PointsA server is not something that is running on a web-page. It's a separate process... There are two sides to web development: Front-End and Back-End. Your web-page is Front-End (the face of the website). The server is the Back-End and it's all the "brain" and the logic that is behind it. You should really take the whole Full Stack JavaScript track, it's really good! Then you'll understand everything.

Jim Dennis
13,075 PointsWhen you say that you have some JavaScript "that is on my web-page" that suggests that it's being run by your browser when you visit that page (the normal JavaScript execution context for most people).
It looks like you're saying that this script is checking some date/time stamp in the current page and, if that's more than 15 minutes ago (1500000 milliseconds), then you have your code pulling data from a different page (and merging it into your document?).
Of course you can do that on page load; and also set a timer for the check to recur periodically while the page is sitting there, open, in a browser.
This will be somewhat inefficient over time (each of the clients will be executing the same code and performing the same additional data fetches and merging). So I'm guessing (especially given your reference to PHP) that you're hoping to devise some way to update the server's storage of the web page which is hosting this JS script. For that you need something on the server side.
Others in this thread have suggest that you could use NodeJS to host a different script on the server. Your client side JS code would then hit some controller/route on your NodeJS server and trigger a script which fetches the new data and stores it to the the filesystem (or database, or whatever is storing the source data for the original page which is hosting your current code).
Does that make sense?

Max Dubinin
12,807 Pointshttp://www.w3schools.com/jsref/met_win_setinterval.asp I think setInterval() is what you need for the timing purpose. For running the .js file I think you'll manage. If not, feel free to reply

Unsubscribed User
Courses Plus Student 114 PointsDoes this work tough there is no windows open on the page?
Unsubscribed User
Courses Plus Student 114 PointsUnsubscribed User
Courses Plus Student 114 PointsYes, I have a server, but I don't know how to implement Node.js to the server(web-page), is there any good documentation on that?