Laravel queues and scheduler on fortrabbit

# Queue

fortrabbit offers no Redis, so the database driver is the queue of choice. It uses the MySQL database. Laravel 11 and later ship the jobs table migration; older versions create it:

# Create a migration for the jobs table locally
php artisan queue:table

# Apply the migration locally
$ php artisan migrate

# Add, commit and push the migration file
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "queue migration"
$ git push

# Run the migration on the App via SSH remote execution
$ ssh {{app-env-id}}@ssh.{{region}}.frbit.app php artisan migrate --force

Set QUEUE_CONNECTION=database in the ENV vars. Then add a worker with this command:

php artisan queue:work --sleep=3 --tries=3 --max-time=3600

Use queue:work, not queue:listen: queue:listen boots Laravel for every job, queue:work boots it once and keeps running. --max-time restarts the worker every hour, which frees memory.

The worker and the scheduler cron are two jobs. Jobs XS holds one job, so both need Jobs SM or larger.

# Scheduler

Laravel's scheduler lets you define recurring tasks in code instead of managing many separate crontab entries. Add a single cron job that runs every minute and let Laravel decide what's actually due:

* * * * * php artisan schedule:run

See job usage for adding the cron job in the dashboard.

Two things to watch:

• Avoid ->runInBackground(), it will not work at all with schedule:run. We have to keep the platform performant for everyone, so we kill any process still running after the job that started it exits - see "do not detach". If you have to use runInBackground(), then it works better with a non stop job that calls artisan schedule:work instead, because that parent job stays running.
• Use ->withoutOverlapping() on tasks that might run long. It stops Laravel from starting a new instance of a task while a previous run is still in progress, keeping schedule:run itself fast. Without it, slow tasks pile up invocation after invocation and can hit the platform's own limit on concurrent instances of the same cron job - see "overlapping jobs".