Laravel (5.7) Task Scheduling

Traditional Scheduled Task Setup

In your day-to-day application development, you often face a situation that requires you to execute certain scripts or commands periodically. If you're working with the *nix system, you are probably aware that cron jobs handle these commands. On the other hand, they're known as scheduled tasks on Windows-based systems.

Let's have a quick look at a simple example of the *nix based cron job.

1	*/5 * * * * /web/statistics.sh

Pretty simple-it runs the statistics.sh file every five minutes!

Although that was a pretty simple use case, you often find yourself in a situation that requires you to implement more complex use cases. On the other hand, a complex system requires you to define multiple cron jobs that run at different time intervals.

Let's see some tasks a complex web application has to perform periodically in the back-end.

• Clean up the unnecessary data from the database back-end.
• Update the front-end caching indexes to keep it up-to-date.
• Calculate the site statistics.
• Send emails.
• Back up different site elements.
• Generate reports.
• And more.

So, as you can see, there's plenty of stuff out there waiting to be run periodically and also at different time intervals. If you're a seasoned system admin, it's a cake walk for you to define the cron jobs for all these tasks, but sometimes we as developers wish that there was an easier way around.

Luckily, Laravel comes with a built-in Task Scheduling API that allows you to define scheduled tasks like never before.

And yes, the next section is all about that—the basics of Laravel task scheduling.

The Laravel Way

In the earlier section, we went through the traditional way of setting up cron jobs. In this section, we'll go through the specifics of Laravel in the context of the Task Scheduling API.

Before we go ahead, the important thing to understand is that the scheduling feature provided by Laravel is just like any other feature and won't be invoked automatically. So if you're thinking that you don't need to do anything at the system level then you're out of luck, I'd say.

In fact, the first thing you should do should you wish to use the Laravel scheduling system is to set up the cron job that runs every minute and calls the artisan command shown in the following snippet.

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

The above artisan command calls the Laravel scheduler, and that in turn executes all the pending cron jobs defined in your application.

Of course, we are yet to see how to define the scheduled tasks in your Laravel application, and that's the very next thing we'll dive into.

It's the schedule method of the App\Console\Kernel class that you need to use should you wish to define application-specific scheduled tasks.

Go ahead and grab the contents of the app/Console/Kernel.php file.

<?php namespace App\Console;
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 = [
    'App\Console\Commands\Inspire',
  ];
   
  /**
   * Define the application's command schedule.
   *
   * @param  \Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule  $schedule
   * @return void
   */
  protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
  {
    $schedule->command('inspire')->hourly();
  }
}

As you can see, the core code itself provides a useful example. In the above example, Laravel runs the inspire artisan command hourly. Don't you think that the syntax is so intuitive in the first place?

In fact, there are a couple of different ways in which Laravel allows you to define schedule tasks:

• Use the closure/callable.
• Call the artisan command.
• Execute the shell command.

Moreover, there are plenty of built-in scheduling frequencies you could choose from:

• every minute/every five minutes
• hourly/daily/weekly/quarterly/yearly
• at a specific time of the day
• and many more

In fact, I would say that it provides a complete set of routines so that you don't ever need to touch the shell to create your custom cron jobs!

Yes I can tell that you're eager to know how to implement your custom scheduled tasks, and that is what I also promised at the beginning of the article.

Create Your First Scheduled Task in Laravel

As we discussed, there are different ways in which Laravel allows you to define scheduled tasks. Let's go through each to understand how it works.

The Closure/Callable Method

The scheduling API provides the call method that allows you to execute a callable or a closure function. Let's revise the app/Console/Kernel.php file with the following code.

<?php
namespace App\Console;
 
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
use Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Console\Kernel as ConsoleKernel;
 
class Kernel extends ConsoleKernel
{
  /**
   * Define the application's command schedule.
   *
   * @param  \Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule  $schedule
   * @return void
   */
  protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
  {
    // the call method
    $schedule->call(function () {
      $posts = DB::table('posts')
        ->select('user_id', DB::raw('count(*) as total_posts'))
        ->groupBy('user_id')
        ->get();
 
      foreach($posts as $post)
      {
        DB::table('users_statistics')
          ->where('user_id', $post->user_id)
          ->update(['total_posts' => $post->total_posts]);
      }
    })->everyThirtyMinutes();
  }
}

As you can see, we've passed the closure function as the first argument of the call method. Also, we've set the frequency to every 30 minutes, so it'll execute the closure function every 30 minutes!

In our example, we count the total posts per user and update the statistics table accordingly.

The Artisan Command

Apart from the closures or callables, you could also schedule an artisan command that will be executed at certain intervals. In fact, that should be the preferred approach over closures as it provides better code organization and reusability at the same time.

Go ahead and revise the contents of the app/Console/Kernel.php file with the following.

<?php
namespace App\Console;
 
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Config;
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 = [
    'App\Console\Commands\UserStatistics'
  ];
  
  /**
   * Define the application's command schedule.
   *
   * @param  \Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule  $schedule
   * @return void
   */
  protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
  {
    // artisan command method
    $schedule->command('statistics:user')->everyThirtyMinutes();
  }
  
  /**
   * Register the Closure based commands for the application.
   *
   * @return void
   */
  protected function commands()
  {
    require base_path('routes/console.php');
  }
}

It's the command method that you would like to use should you wish to schedule an artisan command as shown in the above code snippet. You need to pass the artisan command signature as the first argument of the command method.

Of course, you need to define the corresponding artisan command as well at app/Console/Commands/UserStatistics.php.

<?php
namespace App\Console\Commands;
 
use Illuminate\Console\Command;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
 
class UserStatistics extends Command
{
  /**
   * The name and signature of the console command.
   *
   * @var string
   */
  protected $signature = 'statistics:user';
 
  /**
   * The console command description.
   *
   * @var string
   */
  protected $description = 'Update user statistics';
 
  /**
   * Create a new command instance.
   *
   * @return void
   */
  public function __construct()
  {
    parent::__construct();
  }
 
  /**
   * Execute the console command.
   *
   * @return mixed
   */
  public function handle()
  {
    // calculate new statistics
    $posts = DB::table('posts')
      ->select('user_id', DB::raw('count(*) as total_posts'))
      ->groupBy('user_id')
      ->get();
     
    // update statistics table
    foreach($posts as $post)
    {
      DB::table('users_statistics')
      ->where('user_id', $post->user_id)
      ->update(['total_posts' => $post->total_posts]);
    }
  }
}

The Exec Command

We could say that the methods we've discussed so far were specific to the Laravel application itself. Moreover, Laravel also allows you to schedule the shell commands so that you could run external applications as well.

Let's go through a quick example that demonstrates how to take a backup of your database every day.

<?php
namespace App\Console;
 
use Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Console\Kernel as ConsoleKernel;
 
class Kernel extends ConsoleKernel
{
  /**
   * Define the application's command schedule.
   *
   * @param  \Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule  $schedule
   * @return void
   */
  protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
  {
    // exec method
    $host = config('database.connections.mysql.host');
    $username = config('database.connections.mysql.username');
    $password = config('database.connections.mysql.password');
    $database = config('database.connections.mysql.database');
     
    $schedule->exec("mysqldump -h {$host} -u {$username} -p{$password} {$database}")
      ->daily()
      ->sendOutputTo('/backups/daily_backup.sql');
  }
}

It's apparent from the code that you need to use the exec method of the scheduler, and you need to pass the command that you would like to run as its first argument.

Apart from that, we've also used the sendOutputTo method that allows you to collect the output of the command. On the other hand, there's a method, emailOutputTo, that allows you to email the output contents!

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