Queue workers in Laravel - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Queue Workers in Laravel

📖 Scenario: You are building a Laravel application that needs to send welcome emails to new users without making them wait. To do this, you will use Laravel's queue workers to handle email sending in the background.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Laravel queue worker setup that pushes a job to the queue and processes it to send a welcome email.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a job class called SendWelcomeEmail with a handle method

Create a queue connection configuration variable called QUEUE_CONNECTION set to database

Dispatch the SendWelcomeEmail job to the queue with a user email

Run the queue worker command to process the queued jobs

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Queue workers help run time-consuming tasks like sending emails or processing images in the background, improving user experience by not making them wait.

💼 Career

Understanding Laravel queue workers is essential for backend developers to build scalable and responsive web applications.

1

Create the SendWelcomeEmail job class

Create a Laravel job class called SendWelcomeEmail with a constructor that accepts a $email parameter and stores it in a public property. Add a handle method that will later send the email.

Laravel

<?php

namespace App\Jobs;

use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Bus\Dispatchable;
use Illuminate\Queue\InteractsWithQueue;
use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;

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

    public $email;

    public function __construct($email)
    {
        // Your code here
    }

    public function handle()
    {
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Remember to store the $email parameter in a public property inside the constructor.

2

Set the queue connection to database

In your Laravel .env file, set the variable QUEUE_CONNECTION to database to use the database queue driver.

Laravel

QUEUE_CONNECTION=database
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Open the .env file and add or update the line QUEUE_CONNECTION=database.

3

Dispatch the SendWelcomeEmail job

In a controller or route closure, dispatch the SendWelcomeEmail job with the email [e-mail] using SendWelcomeEmail::dispatch('[e-mail]');.

Laravel

<?php

// Dispatch the SendWelcomeEmail job with '[e-mail]'
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the static dispatch method on the SendWelcomeEmail class with the exact email string.

4

Run the queue worker to process jobs

Run the Laravel queue worker command php artisan queue:work in your terminal to start processing queued jobs.

Laravel

# Run the queue worker command in terminal
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Open your terminal and type php artisan queue:work to start the worker.