Scanner Tasks

You can reach this page from Site Overview, Automations, PHP File Change Scanner, or by clicking the Schedule Scans button in the Security Management panel of the Site Overview.

This page lets you create and manage scheduled tasks which run the PHP File Change Scanner feature of Admin Tools Professional. The PHP File Change Scanner checks your site's files for changes and reports them. Scheduling scans through Panopticon is useful when your site's server does not support CRON jobs, or you cannot otherwise schedule scans using Admin Tools' own automation options.

To create a new task click on the Add button in the toolbar.

To edit an existing task, click on the task's CRON expression (it is shown as a link). Alternatively, select the checkbox next to the task and click the Edit button in the toolbar; if you have selected multiple tasks only the first one will be edited.

To delete one or more tasks, select their checkboxes and click the Delete button in the toolbar.

The task list

The list displays all PHP File Change Scanner tasks for the current site. You can filter the list by:

• Enabled: Show all tasks, only enabled (published) tasks, or only disabled (unpublished) tasks.
• – Manual –: Show all tasks, only scheduled tasks, or only manually triggered scans.

Each row in the list shows:

• Schedule: The CRON expression defining when the scan runs, shown as a clickable link to edit it. If the task was triggered manually (i.e. via the Start Scanning button on the Site Overview), it shows "Manual Scan" instead.
• Run Once: An icon indicating what happens after the task executes: a green repeat icon for recurring tasks, a yellow stop icon if the task will disable itself after one run, or a red landmine icon if the task will delete itself after one run.
• Enabled: Whether the task is active. Click the toggle to enable or disable the task without editing it.
• Last execution status: The result of the most recent run. Possible values are OK (green checkmark), Running (yellow spinner), Never run (blue clock), Will resume (the task ran out of time and will pick up where it left off next CRON invocation), or Failed (red icon, click for details).
• Execution times: The last run date/time, the next scheduled run date/time, and the duration of the last run.
• #: The internal numeric ID of the task.

Creating or editing a task

The Scanner Tasks form only needs a schedule and enables/disables the task — there are no other options, as the PHP File Change Scanner configuration is managed in Admin Tools itself.

Schedule definition

The Schedule section determines when the task will execute. The schedule is a CRON expression. The timezone used is displayed on the page, and depends on the System Configuration options of your Panopticon installation.

The CRON expression engine in Akeeba Panopticon supports the special characters *, ,, -, L, W, #, and /, allowing great flexibility in scheduling. The five fields of the CRON expression are:

• Minutes (0–59)
• Hours (0–23)
• Day of Month (1–31, with L for last day, W for nearest weekday)
• Month (1–12 or JAN–DEC)
• Day of Week (0–6 or SUN–SAT, with L and # for relative days)

You can test your CRON expressions using this third party page.

ℹ️ If you use an LLM (such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, …) to generate a CRON expression, be aware that the results can be fairly inaccurate. Always validate any AI-generated expression with a third party CRON expression tester before relying on it.

The Repetition field determines what happens after the task executes:

• Repeat according to schedule will execute the task periodically according to the schedule. This is what most people expect.
• Run once, then disable this schedule will run the task once according to the schedule, then disable it. The task remains in the list but will not execute again until re-enabled.
• Run once, then DELETE this schedule will run the task once according to the schedule, then permanently delete it. The task will no longer appear anywhere.

Enabled. Should this task execute periodically? You can disable a task if you want to prevent it from executing without permanently deleting it.