Laravel: Queues and Jobs

In Laravel we can delegate the execution of heavy tasks in time or resources to the background, preventing a web request from taking a long time. To do this we can use queued jobs.

Queues

Queues in Laravel provide a unified API for different queuing systems such as AMAZON SQS, Redis or a relational database. The configuration is stored in the config/queue.php file.

If we want to use a database, we can run the following migration to create the necessary table:

php artisan queue:table
php artisan migrate

Additionally, we need to specify that we are going to use the database in the environment variable:

QUEUE_CONNECTION=database

Jobs

A job is a task that we want to perform, in this case in the background. To create a job like ProcessDeliveryNotes in the app/Jobs directory we can use the following command:

php artisan make:job ProcessDeliveryNotes

The generated class implements the ShouldQueue interface, which allows it to be moved to a queue to execute asynchronously. We can inject the necessary dependencies for the task in the class constructor and define the task to be performed in the handle() method.

ProcessDeliveryNotes

class ProcessDeliveryNotes implements ShouldQueue
{
  use Dispatchable, InteractsWithQueue, Queueable, SerializesModels;

  public function __construct(public array $deliveryNotes)
  {}

  public function handle(): void
  {
    // Process the delivery notes
  }
}

To launch the job we use the static dispatch() method, passing as a parameter the list of delivery notes that we have defined in the constructor:

use App\Jobs\ProcessDeliveryNotes;

...

ProcessDeliveryNotes::dispatch($deliveryNotes);

For more information about queued jobs we can consult the official documentation.