Laravel Horizon is a package for Laravel by Taylor Otwell that allows you to monitor Eloquent events in real time. It's built on top of Pusher, which makes it easy to build robust applications using a simple API.
It is designed to provide insights and control over the queue worker processes in a Laravel application. Queues are a way to handle tasks, such as sending emails, processing images, or performing other background jobs, asynchronously in a Laravel application. This is a must-read article prior to hire Laravel developers to learn more about Laravel Horizon.
What is Laravel Horizon?
Laravel Horizon is a Laravel package that provides real-time event notifications and API endpoints for your Laravel applications. It allows you to monitor the jobs waiting to be processed, the jobs currently being processed, and the jobs that have finished processing. This gives you complete visibility into what's going on in your queue system, so you know how many jobs are being processed and how long they take to process.
Laravel Horizon is a real-time event subscription service. It's built on top of Laravel and Vue.js and provides a real-time event stream, allowing you to build your own real-time dashboard for any application. You can use it to build a dashboard that shows information about your application as it is running.
Features of Laravel Horizon
It can be used for any application, including websites, games, and more. It can be used in conjunction with other tools like Datadog or Zabbix (a monitoring tool).
Real-time Monitoring: Laravel Horizon provides a real-time dashboard that allows you to monitor the status of your queue workers, jobs, and failed jobs. You can see which jobs are currently being processed, the throughput of your queues, and more.
Configuration and Control: With Horizon, you can configure various aspects of your queue worker setup, including the number of worker processes, the timeout for processing jobs, and the rate-limiting for specific queues. You can also pause and resume queue workers or specific queues from the dashboard.
Metrics and Insights: Horizon offers detailed metrics and insights into the performance of your queues. You can view historical data on job processing times, failed job statistics, and other relevant metrics to help you optimise your application's queue processing.
Supervision: Horizon includes a supervisor process that helps manage and automatically restart queue worker processes in case they fail. This ensures the reliability and availability of your background job processing.
Notifications: You can set up notifications to alert you when specific events occur, such as when a certain number of jobs fail or a queue exceeds a defined threshold.
Scalability: Laravel Horizon is designed to help you quickly scale your application's queue processing. You can add more queue worker processes to handle increased job loads.
Integration with Laravel Ecosystem: Horizon is built to work seamlessly with other Laravel ecosystem components, such as Laravel Forge (for server management) and Laravel Vapor (for serverless deployments).
How does it work?
Laravel Horizon is a real-time event system for Laravel. It uses Redis as a queue and provides a web interface for monitoring events. This system can monitor events from any source, such as API calls, cron jobs, scheduled tasks, etc. The web interface shows information about queues, jobs and workers in your application, which makes it very easy to debug issues when they arise or just keep an eye on things at all times!
The status info about each queue and the worker’s performance over time (how long they take on average) can also be seen. You can also see the status of individual jobs in progress or recently completed by clicking on their names within each queue listing page.
Why use Laravel Horizon?
Laravel Horizon is a real-time event streaming server. It can handle millions of events per second, making it perfect for handling large amounts of data in your application.
It's easy to set up and use, so you can quickly build new features with Horizon. You can also use other libraries like Laravel Forge and Vapor with Horizon!
Real-Time Monitoring: This helps you track what's happening in your application and quickly identify any issues or bottlenecks in your queue processing.
Enhanced Debugging: Debugging and troubleshooting issues related to background job processing becomes much easier.
Control and Configuration: Flexibility to adjust settings such as the number of worker processes, job timeout limits, and rate limiting for specific queues directly from the dashboard, allowing you to fine-tune your application's queue processing to meet specific requirements.
Automatic Restart of Workers: This feature helps maintain the availability and reliability of your background job processing, reducing the need for manual intervention.
Scalability: This ensures your application can efficiently handle higher volumes of background tasks.
Notifications: They inform you about critical issues and allow you to take action promptly.
Historical Metrics: This information helps you track trends and make data-driven decisions to optimise your queue processing.
Integration with Laravel Ecosystem: Laravel Horizon integrates with other Laravel ecosystem tools and services. It ensures a cohesive development and deployment experience.
Improved Developer Experience: It simplifies the process of working with queues, making it easier to develop and maintain background job functionality.
Common Applications
Laravel Horizon is used to monitor queues, workers and jobs. It's used in several popular applications, including Slack, Trello, and GitHub. It can monitor other services like Redis queue(s). It is also useful to manage Celery tasks by integrating with RabbitMQ or Beanstalkd backends.
Laravel Horizon is a powerful tool for managing and monitoring queue workers in Laravel applications. It can be applied to various scenarios where background job processing is required.
You can take advantage of the Laravel development services Acquaint offers, this being one of them by learning more about the common applications:
Email Queues: One of the most common use cases is handling email sending in a Laravel application. Instead of sending emails synchronously, which could slow down the response time of your application, you can queue email sending as a background job using Laravel Horizon. This ensures that emails are sent without affecting the user experience.
Image Processing: Background image processing is another frequent use case. You can queue image resizing, cropping, or other manipulations to occur asynchronously using Laravel Horizon. This is particularly useful for applications that deal with many images.
File Uploads: When users upload large files, you can use Laravel Horizon to process and store those files in the background. This keeps your application responsive and prevents timeouts during the upload process.
Notification Systems: Applications that send notifications to users (e.g., through push notifications, SMS, or in-app messages) can use Laravel Horizon to queue and send notifications. This ensures that notifications are delivered efficiently without blocking the main application flow.
Scheduled Tasks: Laravel's task scheduling is a powerful feature, and Horizon can manage scheduled tasks that need to run periodically in the background, such as data synchronisation, data cleanup, or generating reports.
Payment Processing: Background processing is essential when dealing with payment gateways. You can use Laravel Horizon to handle payment processing and ensure that transactions are processed reliably.
Job Queue Prioritisation: In applications with multiple job types, you can use Laravel Horizon to prioritise specific jobs over others. For example, critical tasks can be prioritised to ensure they are processed quickly.
WebSocket Broadcasting: For real-time features like chat applications or live notifications, Laravel Horizon can broadcast events via WebSockets. Jobs can be queued to send real-time updates to clients without affecting the application's performance.
API Integration: You can queue API requests to avoid long response times and timeouts when integrating with third-party APIs. Laravel Horizon helps ensure API requests are sent and responses processed asynchronously.
Data Import and Export: Background job processing is often used for data import and export tasks, especially in applications dealing with large datasets. You can queue data import and export jobs to run in the background.
Caching and Cache Warming: To improve application performance, you can use Laravel Horizon to warm up caches or rebuild cache data in the background, ensuring the cache is always up to date.
Data Transformation: Background jobs can be employed for data transformation tasks, such as ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes, where data needs to be transformed and loaded into a different system or format.
Conclusion
In summary, Laravel Horizon is a powerful tool for managing and monitoring the queue system in Laravel applications. It provides real-time insights, control, and automation, ensuring efficient and reliable background job processing.
Laravel Horizon is an excellent tool for developers, especially if you're working with a team. It allows you to create APIs that other developers can use and keep your code clean and organised. Horizon also makes it easy to manage user authentication through Laravel Passport or Auth0 while controlling how users access your app's data.
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