Magento special price still showing after expiration

Posted: December 16, 2011 in Web

Did you set a special price to expire on a certain date in Magento, but it didn’t automatically remove itself? Here’s the fix.

The problem

After much research, I can only assume this special price issue not working properly is a bug in Magento. The only accepted solution was to visit the admin page System > Configuration and Reindex the Data for Product Prices. Fine, but I can’t tell my client to log into his admin every morning and clear his indices.

Create cron jobs

Instead, I created some cron jobs to clear the indices and cache storage every night at midnight.

Reindex all Magento indices

Create one cron using the following command:

php /home/path/to/magento/shell/indexer.php reindexall

Clear all cache

To clear all Magento cache, we will need to create a script file that deletes everything in /var/cache/.

1. Create a file called clearcache.sh in the directory one level above public_html (so it’s not publicly accessible)
2. Put the following lines into that file:

    #!/bin/bash rm -rf /home/path/to/magento/public_html/var/cache/*

3. Edit the path to your Magento installation and /var/cache/ directory as necessary.
4. Create the cron job using the following command:

bash -s < /home/path/to/clearcache.sh