Laravel Task Scheduling

#Introduction

In the past, you may have written a cron configuration entry for each task you needed to schedule on your server. However, this can quickly become a pain because your task schedule is no longer in source control and you must SSH into your server to view your existing cron entries or add additional entries.

Laravel's command scheduler offers a fresh approach to managing scheduled tasks on your server. The scheduler allows you to fluently and expressively define your command schedule within your Laravel application itself. When using the scheduler, only a single cron entry is needed on your server. Your task schedule is defined in the app/Console/Kernel.php file's schedule method. To help you get started, a simple example is defined within the method.

#Defining Schedules

You may define all of your scheduled tasks in the schedule method of your application's App\Console\Kernel class. To get started, let's take a look at an example. In this example, we will schedule a closure to be called every day at midnight. Within the closure we will execute a database query to clear a table:

<?php

namespace App\Console;

use App\Models\Payments\MemberSubscriber;
use Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Console\Kernel as ConsoleKernel;

class Kernel extends ConsoleKernel
{
    /**
     * The Artisan commands provided by your application.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $commands = [
        //
    ];

    /**
     * Define the application's command schedule.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule  $schedule
     * @return void
     */
    protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
    {
        //** Google Play subscribe task
        $schedule->call(function () {
            MemberSubscriber::byGooglePlay()->get()
                            ->filterNextSubscribe()
                            ->renewalSubscribe();
        })->everyMinute();
    }

    /**
     * Register the commands for the application.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    protected function commands()
    {
        $this->load(__DIR__.'/Commands');

        require base_path('routes/console.php');
    }
}

In addition to scheduling using closures, you may also schedule invokable objects. Invokable objects are simple PHP classes that contain an __invoke method:

$schedule->call(new GooglePlaySubscribeTask)->daily();

If you would like to view an overview of your scheduled tasks and the next time they are scheduled to run, you may use the schedule:list Artisan command:

php artisan schedule:list

#Running The Scheduler

Now that we have learned how to define scheduled tasks, let's discuss how to actually run them on our server. The schedule:run Artisan command will evaluate all of your scheduled tasks and determine if they need to run based on the server's current time.

So, when using Laravel's scheduler, we only need to add a single cron configuration entry to our server that runs the schedule:run command every minute. If you do not know how to add cron entries to your server, consider using a service such as Laravel Forge which can manage the cron entries for you:

* * * * * cd /path-to-your-project && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

#Running The Scheduler Locally

Typically, you would not add a scheduler cron entry to your local development machine. Instead, you may use the schedule:work Artisan command. This command will run in the foreground and invoke the scheduler every minute until you terminate the command:

php artisan schedule:work