WordPress cron creation during plugin installation results with initial execution

Question

I'm currently developing a plugin which uses WP cron. During the installation of the plugin, I'm creating 2 needed cron jobs with a timestamp of midnight -2 and a and midnight -1 hour, since job 2 should only run 1 hour after job 1.

Even when using a timestamp during creation which is 3-4 hours in the future, it seems like that both functions are getting initially executed directly after the plugin install / update, which results in a lot of issues.

wp_schedule_event( strtotime( 'midnight' ) + ( - 2 * HOUR_IN_SECONDS ), 'daily', 'test1' );

wp_schedule_event( strtotime( 'midnight' ) + ( - 1 * HOUR_IN_SECONDS ), 'daily', 'test2' );

Any idea how to prevent an initial execution of each event during creation?

Answer 1

strtotime( 'midnight' ) will give you midnight for today, which has already happened! You want midnight for tomorrow.

e.g. date( 'F jS H:i:s', strtotime( 'midnight' ) ) on July 19th is July 19th 00:00:00

However, date( 'F jS H:i:s', strtotime( 'tomorrow midnight' ) ) would be July 20th 00:00:00

...which is what you want! So just use tomorrow midnight instead.