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Pushing Jobs To Queue

Updated: Jan 11, 2019 — 5 min Read#queues

There are several ways to push jobs into the queue:

Queue::push(new InvoiceEmail($order));

Bus::dispatch(new InvoiceEmail($order));

dispatch(new InvoiceEmail($order));

(new InvoiceEmail($order))->dispatch();

As explained in a previous dive, calls on the Queue facade are calls on the queue driver your app uses, calling the push method for example is a call to the push method of the Queue\DatabaseQueue class in case you're using the database queue driver.

There are several useful methods you can use:

// Push the job on a specific queue
Queue::pushOn('emails', new InvoiceEmail($order));

// Push the job after a given number of seconds
Queue::later(60, new InvoiceEmail($order));

// Push the job on a specific queue after a delay
Queue::laterOn('emails', 60, new InvoiceEmail($order));

// Push multiple jobs
Queue::bulk([
    new InvoiceEmail($order),
    new ThankYouEmail($order)
]);

// Push multiple jobs on a specific queue
Queue::bulk([
    new InvoiceEmail($order),
    new ThankYouEmail($order)
], null, 'emails');

After calling any of these methods, the selected queue driver will store the given information in a storage space for workers to pick up on demand.

Using the command bus

Dispatching jobs to queue using the command bus gives you extra control; you can set the selected connectionqueue, and delay from within your job class, decide if the command should be queued or run instantly, send the job through a pipeline before running it, actually you can even handle the whole queueing process from within your job class.

The Bus facade proxies to the Contracts\Bus\Dispatcher container alias, this alias is resolved into an instance of Bus\Dispatcher inside Bus\BusServiceProvider:

$this->app->singleton(Dispatcher::class, function ($app) {
    return new Dispatcher($app, function ($connection = null) use ($app) {
        return $app[QueueFactoryContract::class]->connection($connection);
    });
});

So doing Bus::dispatch() calls the dispatch() method of the Bus\Dispatcher class:

public function dispatch($command)
{
    if ($this->queueResolver && $this->commandShouldBeQueued($command)) {
        return $this->dispatchToQueue($command);
    } else {
        return $this->dispatchNow($command);
    }
}

This method decides if the given job should be dispatched to queue or run instantly, the commandShouldBeQueued() method checks if the job class is an instance of Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue, so using this method your job will only be queued in case you implement the ShouldQueue interface.

We're not going to look into dispatchNow in this dive, it'll be discussed in detail when we dive into how workers run jobs. For now let's look into how the Bus dispatches your job to queue:

public function dispatchToQueue($command)
{
    $connection = isset($command->connection) ? $command->connection : null;

    $queue = call_user_func($this->queueResolver, $connection);

    if (! $queue instanceof Queue) {
        throw new RuntimeException('Queue resolver did not return a Queue implementation.');
    }

    if (method_exists($command, 'queue')) {
        return $command->queue($queue, $command);
    } else {
        return $this->pushCommandToQueue($queue, $command);
    }
}

First Laravel checks if a connection property is defined in your job class, using the property you can set which connection Laravel should send the queued job to, if no property was defined null will be used and in such case Laravel will use the default connection.

Using the connection value, Laravel uses a queueResolver closure to build the instance of the queue driver that should be used, this closure is set inside Bus\BusServiceProvider while registering the Dispatcher instance:

function ($connection = null) use ($app) {
    return $app[Contracts\Queue\Factory::class]->connection($connection);
}

Contracts\Queue\Factory is an alias for Queue\QueueManager, so in other words this closure returns an instance of QueueManager and sets the desired connection for the manager to know which driver to use.

Finally the dispatchToQueue method checks if the job class has a queue method, if that's the case the dispatcher will just call this method giving you full control over how the job should be queued, you can select the queue, assign delay, set maximum retries, timeout, etc...

In case no queue method was found, a call to pushCommandToQueue() calls the proper pushmethod on the selected queue driver:

protected function pushCommandToQueue($queue, $command)
{
    if (isset($command->queue, $command->delay)) {
        return $queue->laterOn($command->queue, $command->delay, $command);
    }

    if (isset($command->queue)) {
        return $queue->pushOn($command->queue, $command);
    }

    if (isset($command->delay)) {
        return $queue->later($command->delay, $command);
    }

    return $queue->push($command);
}

The dispatcher checks for queue and delay properties in your Job class & picks the appropriate queue method based on that.

So can I set the queue, delay, and connection inside the job class?

Yes, you can also set a tries and timeout properties and the queue driver will use these values as well, here's how your job class might look like:

class SendInvoiceEmail{
    public $connection = 'default';

    public $queue = 'emails';

    public $delay = 60;

    public $tries = 3;

    public $timeout = 20;
}

Setting job configuration on the fly

Using the dispatch() global helper you can do something like this:

dispatch(new InvoiceEmail($order))
        ->onConnection('default')
        ->onQueue('emails')
        ->delay(60);

This only works if you use the Bus\Queueable trait in your job class, this trait contains several methods that you may use to set some properties on the job class before dispatching it, for example:

public function onQueue($queue)
{
    $this->queue = $queue;

    return $this;
}

But in your example we call the methods on the return of dispatch()!

Here's the trick:

function dispatch($job)
{
    return new PendingDispatch($job);
}

This is the definition of the dispatch() helper in Foundation/helpers.php, it returns an instance of Bus\PendingDispatch and inside this class we have methods like this:

public function onQueue($queue)
{
    $this->job->onQueue($queue);

    return $this;
}

So when we do dispatch(new JobClass())->onQueue('default'), the onQueue method of PendingDispatch will call the onQueue method on the job class, as we mentioned earlier job classes need to use the Queueable trait for all this to work.

Then where's the part where the Dispatcher::dispatch method is called?

Once you do dispatch(new JobClass())->onQueue('default') you'll have the job instance ready for dispatching, the actual work happens inside PendingDispatch::__destruct():

public function __destruct()
{
    app(Dispatcher::class)->dispatch($this->job);
}

This method, when called, will resolve an instance of Dispatcher from the container and call the dispatch() method on it. A __destruct() is a PHP magic method that's called when all references to the object no longer exist or when the script terminates, and since we don't store a reference to the PendingDispatch instance anywhere the __destruct method will be called immediately:

// Here the destructor will be called rightaway
dispatch(new JobClass())->onQueue('default');

// Here the desctructor will be called if we call unset($temporaryVariable)
// or when the script finishes execution.
$temporaryVariable = dispatch(new JobClass())->onQueue('default');

Using the Dispatchable trait

You can use the Bus\Dispatchable trait on your job class to be able to dispatch your jobs like this:

(new InvoiceEmail($order))->dispatch();

Here's how the dispatch method of Dispatchable looks like:

public static function dispatch()
{
    return new PendingDispatch(new static(...func_get_args()));
}

As you can see it uses an instance of PendingDispatch, that means we can do something like:

(new InvoiceEmail($order))->dispatch()->onQueue('emails');


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By Mohamed Said

Hello! I'm a former Laravel core team member & VP of Engineering at Foodics. In this publication, I share everything I know about Laravel's core, packages, and tools.

You can find me on Twitter and Github.

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