After Rana pointed me to Yoichi's MEDM snapshot script, I learned how to use Xvfb, which is what Yoichi used to write screens without a real screen. With this I wrote a new cron script, which I added to Mafalda's cron tab to be run once a day at 6am.
The script is called webview_update.cron and is in /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/AutoUpdate/.
#!/bin/bash
DISPLAY=:6
export DISPLAY
#Check if Xvfb server is already running
pid=`ps -eaf|grep vfb | grep $DISPLAY | awk '{print $2}'`
if [ $pid ]; then
echo "Xvfb already running [pid=${pid}]" >/dev/null
else
# Start Xvfb
echo "Starting Xvfb on $DISPLAY"
Xvfb $DISPLAY -screen 0 1600x1200x24 >&/dev/null &
fi
pid=$!
echo $pid > /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/AutoUpdate/Xvfb.pid
sleep 3
#Running the matlab process
/cvs/cds/caltech/apps/linux/matlab/bin/matlab -display :6 -logfile /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/AutoUpdate/webview.log -r webview_simlink_update
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