The Complete Guide to Laravel Queues: From Basics to Production

Queues are essential for building responsive applications. Any task that takes more than a few hundred milliseconds — sending emails, processing images, generating reports — belongs in a queue.

Choosing the Right Queue Driver

Laravel supports several queue backends. Database is perfect for getting started with zero infrastructure. Redis offers better performance for high-throughput applications. SQS is ideal for auto-scaling cloud deployments where you want AWS to manage the infrastructure.

Creating Robust Jobs

A well-designed job is idempotent — running it multiple times produces the same result. Use database transactions, unique job IDs, and the ShouldBeUnique interface to prevent duplicate processing. Always define $tries, $backoff, and $timeout properties.

Job Batching for Complex Workflows

Laravel's job batching lets you dispatch a group of jobs and execute callbacks when the entire batch completes. Use batches for import/export operations: dispatch one job per CSV row, then send a completion notification when all rows are processed.

Handling Failures Gracefully

Implement the failed() method on your jobs to handle failures — notify admins, log context, or queue a compensating action. Use php artisan queue:failed to inspect and retry failed jobs.

Monitoring in Production

Use Laravel Horizon for Redis-based queues to get a beautiful dashboard with real-time metrics, job throughput graphs, and automatic balancing across queue workers. For database queues, build a simple monitoring endpoint that checks the jobs table count.

A properly configured queue system transforms your application from one that makes users wait to one that responds instantly and handles work reliably in the background.