How to Use Laravel Queue on Production

In Laravel, queues play a pivotal role in managing jobs that require significant processing time, ensuring that users don't have to wait indefinitely. Let's explore how queues work and how they can be optimized for seamless job execution.

Consider a scenario where we want to run a job called "RunGameJob" that takes a considerable amount of time, say 2 minutes. Instead of making users wait, we dispatch the job to a queue to handle it in the background. Here's a snippet of how we can achieve this in Laravel:

if ($checkCurrentRunnigGame) {

    return back()->with('error', 'Game is already running.');

}

dispatch(new RunGameJob)->onQueue('default');

return redirect()->to('dashboard')

    ->with('success', 'Game start successfully.');

Now, let's delve into how we can efficiently manage queue workers to ensure smooth job execution.

Running Queue Workers

To start processing jobs in the queue, we run the php artisan queue:work command. This command continuously checks for pending jobs in the queue and executes them.

Challenges with Manual Queue Worker Management

While manually running the queue worker works for development, it's not feasible for production environments where we can't afford to keep a terminal open indefinitely. We need a solution that ensures continuous job processing even if the terminal is closed.

Solutions: Cron Job and Supervisor

Two common solutions to this problem are utilizing cron jobs or employing Supervisor.

Cron Job: This option involves scheduling the queue worker command to run at regular intervals using cron. For example, to run the queue worker every minute, we can use:

Artisan::command('queue:worker')->everyMinute();

However, this approach may lead to concurrency issues if multiple instances of the queue worker attempt to process the same job simultaneously.

Supervisor: Supervisor operates at the operating system level and automatically restarts the queue worker if it stops unexpectedly. To install Supervisor on your server:

Use the terminal directly on the web server or SSH to access and install Supervisor:

sudo apt-get install supervisor

Create a configuration file named laravel-worker.conf within the /etc/supervisor/conf.d directory and add the necessary configuration settings.

Execute the following commands to update and start Supervisor:

sudo supervisorctl reread

sudo supervisorctl update

sudo supervisorctl start "laravel-worker:*"

Handling Exceptions

In case you encounter exceptions like "laravel-worker: ERROR (no such group)," it indicates that Supervisor is unable to detect your configuration file. To resolve this, add the following code to the supervisord.conf file located in the /etc directory:

[include]

files = supervisor/conf.d/*.conf

By effectively managing queue workers using cron jobs or Supervisor, Laravel developers can ensure efficient job processing, providing users with a seamless experience while optimizing resource utilization.