How to Create Queues in Laravel

 

Laravel Queues is a powerful feature of the Laravel web application framework that allows you to defer time-consuming tasks and run them in the background. This can improve the performance and user experience of your website by ensuring that time-consuming tasks do not block other requests.

In this tutorial, we will cover the basics of Laravel Queues and how to use them in your web applications.

Setting up Laravel Queues

To use Laravel Queues, you need to have a working Laravel application. If you don't already have one, you can create a new Laravel application using the following command:

composer create-project laravel/laravel my-app

Next, we need to install the Laravel Queue package. This can be done by running the following command:

composer require laravel/queue

Once the package is installed, we need to update the config/queue.php file to specify which queue driver we want to use. Laravel supports a variety of queue drivers, including databases, Beanstalkd, Amazon SQS, and more. In this tutorial, we will use the database queue driver, which stores the queued jobs in a database table.

To use the database queue driver, we need to update the config/queue.php file to set the default option to database and update the connections array to include a database entry with the appropriate settings for your database. For example:

'default' => 'database',

'connections' => [

    'database' => [

        'driver' => 'database',

        'table' => 'jobs',

        'queue' => 'default',

        'retry_after' => 90,

    ],

]

Once the queue configuration is set up, we need to create the jobs table that will store the queued jobs. This can be done by running the following command:

php artisan queue:table

php artisan migrate

Once you have set up Laravel Queues, deferring tasks to a queue is relatively simple. Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to do it:

Step 1: Create a Job Class

The first step is to create a job class that represents the task you want to defer to a queue. A job class should implement the Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue interface, which indicates that it should be queued.

Here is an example of a simple job class that sends an email:

namespace App\Jobs; 
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue; 
use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;

use Illuminate\Queue\InteractsWithQueue;

use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Mail;



class SendEmail implements ShouldQueue
{
    
use InteractsWithQueue, Queueable, SerializesModels;

    

protected $email;
    
protected $subject;
    
protected $message;

    

/**
 * Create a new job instance.

 *

 * @param string $email

 * @param string $subject

 * @param string $message

 */
    
public function __construct(string $email, string $subject, string $message)
    {
        $this->email = $email;
        
$this->subject = $subject;
        
$this->message = $message;

 }

    

/**

 * Execute the job.

 *

 * @return void

 */

    public function handle()
    {
        
Mail::raw($this->message, function ($message) {
            
$message->to($this->email)->subject($this->subject);
        });

 }


}

In this example, we have created a SendEmail job class that takes an email address, subject, and message as parameters in the constructor. The handle method is where the actual work of sending the email is done.

Step 2: Dispatch the Job

Once you have created your job class, you can dispatch it to the queue using the dispatch method. This method will add the job to the queue and return immediately, allowing your application to continue processing other requests.

Here is an example of how to dispatch the SendEmail job from the previous step:

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// Create a new SendEmail job instance

$job = new App\Jobs\SendEmail('recipient@example.com', 'Hello', 'Hello, world!');

// Dispatch the job to the queue

dispatch($job);

Step 3: Process the Queued Jobs

The final step is to process the queued jobs. This is done by running the Laravel queue worker, which listens for new jobs on the queue and runs them as they become available.

To run the queue worker, you can use the following Artisan command:

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php artisan queue:work

Alternatively, you can run the queue worker in the background using a process manager like Supervisor. This allows the queue worker to run continuously, processing queued jobs as they come in.

That's it! You have now learned how to defer tasks to a queue in Laravel and process them in the background.