#Queues

Queueing tasks to be run in the background is a critical part of creating a great user experience.

NativePHP has built-in support for Laravel's Queues.

#Queueing a job

If you're familiar with queueing jobs in Laravel, you should feel right at home. There's nothing special you need to do.

Jobs live in the SQLite database that your app uses by default and the jobs table migration will have been created and migrated for you.

#Processing Jobs / Working the Queue

By default, NativePHP will boot up a single queue worker which will consume jobs from the default queue.

If you wish to modify the configuration of this worker or run more workers, see Configuring workers.

#Configuring workers

Once you publish the NativePHP config file using php artisan vendor:publish, you will find a queue_workers key in config/nativephp.php. Here are some acceptable values to get you started:

'queue_workers' => [
    'one' => [],
    'two' => [],
    'three' => [
        'queues' => ['high'],
        'memory_limit' => 1024,
        'timeout' => 600,
    ],
    'four' => [
        'queues' => ['high'],
    ],
    'five' => [
        'memory_limit' => 1024,
    ],
],

Each item in the array will be spun up as a persistent Child Process, with the key name you provide being used as both the process's and the worker's alias.

You may configure which queues a worker is able to process jobs from, its memory limit and its timeout.

If you do not provide values for any of these settings, the following sensible defaults will be used:

'queues' => ['default'],
'memory_limit' => 128,
'timeout' => 60,

#Managing workers

The handy QueueWorker::up() and QueueWorker::down() methods available on Facades\QueueWorker can be used to start and stop workers, should you need to.

use Native\DTOs\QueueConfig;
use Native\Laravel\Facades\QueueWorker;
 
$queueConfig = new QueueConfig(alias: 'manual', queuesToConsume: ['default'], memoryLimit: 1024, timeout: 600);
 
QueueWorker::up($queueConfig);
 
// Alternatively, if you already have the worker config in your config/nativephp.php file, you may simply use its alias:
QueueWorker::up(alias: 'manual');
 
// Later...
QueueWorker::down(alias: 'manual');

#When to Queue

Given that your database and application typically exist on the same machine (i.e. there's no network involved), queueing background tasks can mostly be left for very intense operations and when making API calls over the network.

Even so, you may find it more user-friendly to have slow tasks complete in the main application thread. You may simply choose to have your UI indicate that something is occurring (e.g. with a loading spinner) while the user waits for the process to finish.

This may be clearer for the user and easier to handle in case issues arise, as you can provide visual feedback to the user and they can try again more easily.