{"id":459,"date":"2026-07-14T13:02:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T13:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/laravel-horizon-in-production-the-queue-setup-i-stopped-babysitting\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T13:02:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T13:02:10","slug":"laravel-horizon-in-production-the-queue-setup-i-stopped-babysitting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/laravel-horizon-in-production-the-queue-setup-i-stopped-babysitting\/","title":{"rendered":"Laravel Horizon in Production: The Queue Setup I Stopped Babysitting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Confession: for about two years I ran Laravel queues the boring way. php artisan queue:work<\/code> behind supervisord, one config per environment, and a Slack alert when jobs went sideways. It mostly worked. Until it didn’t.<\/p>\n

Last winter I got a 3am ping from a client’s app. Their nightly export job had been silently retrying for six hours because a Redis eviction had killed the reserved key mid-run. I logged in, tailed a log, guessed at the state, restarted workers, and went back to bed feeling stupid. That was the week I finally moved every Laravel project I own onto Horizon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is what actually changed. Not the marketing tour. The stuff that mattered on a Tuesday when a queue was misbehaving.<\/p>\n

What queue:work actually leaves you doing yourself<\/h2>\n

I don’t want to trash queue:work<\/code>. It’s fine. But every operational thing I used to bolt on the side, Horizon just does.<\/p>\n

A dashboard that shows me current throughput, wait time, and per-queue backlog without SSH. A first-class concept of supervisor processes that scale worker count based on load. Job payload inspection for failed jobs, including tags I set on the job itself. Metrics I can graph without wiring up Prometheus by hand.<\/p>\n

The old me had a Grafana panel reading LLEN queues:default<\/code> from Redis, plus a scrappy Python script that parsed Laravel’s failed_jobs<\/code> table into Slack notifications. All of that is either gone or three lines of config now.<\/p>\n

Here’s the shape of my old worker unit for context:<\/p>\n

[program:app-worker]\nprocess_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d\ncommand=php \/var\/www\/app\/artisan queue:work redis --queue=high,default --sleep=1 --tries=3 --max-time=3600\nautostart=true\nautorestart=true\nnumprocs=8\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
Eight workers, hardcoded. During a big export I was over-provisioned. At 3am I was under-provisioned. Nothing shifted based on the queue.<\/p>\n
The Horizon config that actually matters<\/h2>\n
Install is the usual composer require laravel\/horizon<\/code> then php artisan horizon:install<\/code>. The interesting part is config\/horizon.php<\/code>. This is the shape I run in production:<\/p>\n
'environments' => [\n    'production' => [\n        'supervisor-fast' => [\n            'connection' => 'redis',\n            'queue' => ['emails', 'webhooks'],\n            'balance' => 'auto',\n            'autoScalingStrategy' => 'time',\n            'minProcesses' => 2,\n            'maxProcesses' => 12,\n            'memory' => 192,\n            'tries' => 3,\n            'timeout' => 60,\n        ],\n        'supervisor-exports' => [\n            'connection' => 'redis',\n            'queue' => ['exports'],\n            'balance' => 'simple',\n            'minProcesses' => 1,\n            'maxProcesses' => 3,\n            'memory' => 512,\n            'tries' => 1,\n            'timeout' => 1800,\n        ],\n    ],\n],\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
Two things I got wrong the first time.<\/p>\n
balance<\/code> matters more than the docs make it sound. auto<\/code> with autoScalingStrategy: time<\/code> is what I actually want in most apps: workers migrate from a quiet queue to a busy one, and the strategy picks based on estimated time to clear the backlog rather than raw job count. simple<\/code> splits workers evenly, which I want only for slow queues where I don’t want small jobs starving a big one.<\/p>\n
One supervisor per timeout class, not one per queue. I used to define a supervisor per queue. Bad. If your emails need to finish in 60 seconds and your exports need 30 minutes, you want two supervisors. Timeouts are set per-supervisor, not per-job.<\/p>\n
Tag your jobs (this is the sleeper feature)<\/h2>\n
The dashboard’s Failed Jobs tab is fine, but the tags are what changed my life. Every job I ship now gets tagged with the entity it touches:<\/p>\n
class SendInvoiceEmail implements ShouldQueue\n{\n    public function __construct(public Invoice $invoice) {}\n\n    public function tags(): array\n    {\n        return ['invoice:'.$this->invoice->id, 'user:'.$this->invoice->user_id];\n    }\n\n    public function handle(): void\n    {\n        \/\/ send it\n    }\n}\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
Now when a customer emails me at 11pm asking why they didn’t get their receipt, I paste their user ID into the Horizon search and see every job ever queued for them, passed or failed. I used to grep production logs for this. I lost hours doing that.<\/p>\n
For genuine failure alerts, I wire the JobFailed<\/code> event into a small notification bus. Horizon’s own notifications config handles wait-time and long-wait alerts. Anything else routes through my normal error stack. If you want the wider picture of how I structure that side of a Laravel app, my Laravel Octane and FrankenPHP notes<\/a> cover the request side.<\/p>\n
Redis is doing the actual work<\/h2>\n
Worth remembering: Horizon isn’t magic. Everything you see in the dashboard is Redis lists, Redis sorted sets, and a small metrics snapshot table. The queue itself is a Redis list that workers pop off using blocking list operations<\/a>, moving jobs onto a reserved list until they finish. If a worker dies mid-job, Redis doesn’t recover it for you. The reserved job sits there until a supervisor process reclaims it after its visibility timeout.<\/p>\n
Which is why the winter incident I mentioned happened. My Redis eviction policy was allkeys-lru<\/code>, my instance was memory-pressured, and Redis quietly dropped keys that Horizon expected to still exist. I switched to noeviction<\/code> on the queue Redis and moved cache to its own instance. That’s not a Horizon lesson, it’s the lesson Horizon forced me to learn about my stack.<\/p>\n
Observability I actually use<\/h2>\n
The built-in metrics view is good, but I still export three things to Grafana via a tiny scheduled command.<\/p>\n
Oldest waiting job age per queue. This is my alert signal, not queue depth. Failed job rate over the last hour. Average job runtime per class name, so I can spot regressions when a payload changes and jobs quietly get slower.<\/p>\n
You can pull these from Horizon’s Redis metrics directly, or use one of the community Prometheus exporters. If you’re already on Sentry, their queue monitoring product<\/a> handles the alerting end without the Grafana glue, which is what I set up for my consulting work these days. There’s a running list of that work over on my portfolio<\/a> if you want to see the shape of it.<\/p>\n
When I still reach for raw workers<\/h2>\n
Two cases.<\/p>\n
Very small apps where I don’t want the Horizon dashboard as an operational surface at all. If the whole app is one queued email an hour, queue:work<\/code> behind a systemd unit is fewer moving parts and one less package to keep patched.<\/p>\n
Long-running data pipelines that I’d rather run as a real batch job. Horizon can technically handle 30-minute jobs, but the observability lies to you: a job running for 25 minutes looks the same as a stuck one until it isn’t. For anything I’d call a pipeline I use a separate runner and log to my normal ingestion path instead of the queue.<\/p>\n
For the everyday Laravel 12 app with mixed workloads, though, I don’t run raw workers anymore. Horizon paid for itself the day I stopped writing my own dashboards. If you’re catching up on other things that shipped in that release, my Laravel 12 features roundup<\/a> has the rest.<\/p>\n
What to do this week<\/h2>\n
If you’re already on Laravel 11 or 12, spend a couple of hours doing this.<\/p>\n
    \n
  1. composer require laravel\/horizon<\/code>, publish the config, set up two supervisors like the shape above. One for short jobs, one for long ones.<\/li>\n
  2. Add a tags()<\/code> method to your five loudest jobs. Search for a real customer ID in the dashboard and see what falls out.<\/li>\n
  3. Turn on Horizon’s built-in wait-time notification for at least the queue you care about most.<\/li>\n
  4. Change your alert from queue depth > N<\/code> to oldest waiting job age > N seconds<\/code>. Depth lies. Age doesn’t.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    That’s it. You’ll have caught something in the first week you would’ve missed. And you’ll finally know what your workers are actually doing at 3am, which is the whole point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    I ran Laravel queues on queue:work + supervisord for two years, then a 3am alert made me switch to Horizon. Here’s the config that actually stuck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":"I ran Laravel queues on queue:work + supervisord for two years, then a 3am alert made me switch to Horizon. Here's the config that actually stuck.","rank_math_focus_keyword":"laravel horizon","rank_math_canonical_url":"","rank_math_robots":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[147,52],"tags":[49,80,56,511,329,53,175,307],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-backend","category-php","tag-backend","tag-devops","tag-laravel","tag-laravel-horizon","tag-observability","tag-php","tag-queues","tag-redis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abrarqasim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}