How to publish scheduled pages on Wagtail

Often times, editors need to set up some pages on draft mode in Wagtail and publish them later on at a certain time under Settings tab. As a developer you need to support that required option by running a periodic command that Wagtail provides.

That command is python manage.py publish_scheduled_pages which it publishes, updates or unpublishes pages which were set up by an editor. The Wagtail docs recommend to run it every hour.

Now, you could run that command either manually, which I don´t really recommend because I want you to have freedom, or much better you can save a bash script on your server and then run it any time you like.

#!/bin/bash
source /home/myuser/myproject/venv/bin/activate
python /home/myuser/myproject/manage.py publish_scheduled_pages --settings=config.settings.production

The script activates the project virtual environment and then runs the Wagtail command publish_scheduled_pages.

If you are on a Linux machine, install crontab if you don't have it, and then run the next command on your terminal

crontab -e

Add the end of the file, write the following:

0 * * * * /home/myuser/myproject/management/publish_scheduled_pages.sh

Make your shell script executable: chmod +x /home/myuser/myproject/management/publish_scheduled_pages.sh

If you prefer it, you can also use systemd timers instead of cron:

# /etc/systemd/system/wagtail-scheduled-pages.service
[Unit]
Description=Wagtail Scheduled Pages Publisher

[Service]
Type=oneshot
User=myuser
WorkingDirectory=/home/myuser/myproject
ExecStart=/home/myuser/myproject/venv/bin/python manage.py publish_scheduled_pages --settings=config.settings.production