Date updated: February 21, 201.

State: Still Active.

Leaning on (including) illuminate/queue version: 5.7.27

What?

Framework agnostic background task queue management for Beanstalkd, SQS. Easy to use in pure PHP, Symfony, Laravel, Yii2 projects. Based on illuminate/queue (Laravel Queues).

A background task management using multiple drivers with ability to register custom drivers.

What is a background task management? simple words - offloading work to background jobs. read more: https://www.slideshare.net/JurianSluiman/queue-your-work

Why?

We faced a problem needing a queue management for a Symfony side-project and a pure PHP project that has a framework agnostic approach in mind. This means - low, if at all amount of dependencies.

The available popular packages at that time were:

• illuminate/queue (Laravel Framework, which is available for standalone as can be seen in here, the problem is the amount of bloated dependencies [e.g.: "illuminate/console", "illuminate/container", "illuminate/contracts", "illuminate/database", "illuminate/events", "illuminate/filesystem", "illuminate/pagination", "illuminate/support": "5.8.*"]).
• yiisoft/yii2-queue (which is bound to the Yii Framework).

As each package had it's problems, we sat to create this library - a framework agnostic, queue background task management, available for use for pure PHP projects as well.

How?

ENTER - Mallabee Queue a.k.a MQ / MQueue (by mallabee.com)

By leveraging the understanding of queues, best practices and ease of use from multiple libraries such as yiisoft/yii2-queue, illuminate/queue.

We have taken the illuminate/queue package and highly modified it, so take a note as we are leaning on that when we develop new features and maintain this package.

Advantages / Features:

• Framework agnostic - use in pure PHP projects, Symfony, Laravel, Yii, Zend, anything you wish.
• Register custom drivers.
• Allow usage of custom serializer/de-serializer (like jms/serializer) when encoding/decoding jobs payloads via a container, if not provided - uses json_encode, json_decode.

Usage

First thing to know is that most of the missing information you can find at illuminate/queue docs as our package is pretty similar (although with some changes): https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/queues#introduction

What will you need/might need to know to start

• Basic PHP understanding.
• What is queue management & background jobs.
• Beanstalkd (more read about queuing: https://jtreminio.com/blog/queues-working-smart-faster-in-parallel/).
• Amazon SQS.
• Event Dispatcher.
• Container.
• Supervisord.
• Serializer / De-serializer.

Seeding work to Queue Manager

To start, create a new Queue manager instance.

use Mallabee\Queue\Core\Manager as Queue;

$queue = new Queue;

$instance = $queue->configure('beanstalkd', [
    'host' => 'localhost',
    'queue' => 'default',
]);

// If you like - set last configured instance as global
$queue->setAsGlobal();

Once the instance has been registered and configured. You may use it like so to seed new jobs:

// As an instance...
$queue->push('SendEmail', array('message' => $message));

// If setAsGlobal has been called...
Queue::push('SendEmail', array('message' => $message));

Registering a custom queue handler driver

As default - we have provided you with popular queue drivers default out of the box, this includes:

• Beanstalkd
• Amazon SQS
• Redis (Currently not implemented yet because requires migrating of illuminate/redis package)

If you would like to create your own custom queue - follow these queues folders and create your custom queue driver.

Note: Make sure all your connector, driver and job files are inside same folder

Then when you have the driver ready, use it by registering and configuring it like so:

use Mallabee\Queue\Core\Manager as Queue;

$queue = new Queue;

$this->registerDriver('mycustomdriver', new \Drivers\MyCustomDriver\MyCustomDriverConnector());

$instance = $queue->configure('mycustomdriver', [
    'host' => 'localhost',
    'queue' => 'default',
]);

// If you like - set last configured instance as global
$queue->setAsGlobal();

Using the queue and processing work via the Worker

Advise the demo app that is located under example folder to understand how you can pull jobs from the queue and process them.

There are multiple folders in there - we suggest to start with ExampleEasy to get an understanding, this example interacts with beanstalkd for the queue management.

Traits and their usage

InteractsWithQueue (Job trait)

• Allows a job to interact with the queue - delete a job, etc..

JobUtils (Job trait)

• Populate the job parameters with ease. Helps when you want to easily interact with the parameters (due to ability to decide the parameters types).

Passing your Container, Event Dispatcher, Logger, Exception Handler, Serializer

Container

We are using the popular PSR container interface.

The container is passed to the job in-order to allow you to get your dependencies easily.

Also - it's used for custom serializing / de-serializing of the job payload.

Currently supported containers:

• PSR complaint: Symfony, Laravel, etc..

Event Dispatcher

Notice that we only use the listen & dispatch of the interface, no need to implement anything else.

Currently supported containers:

• league/event (via the CommonAdapters).

Logger

We are using the popular PSR logger interface.

Used in the queue utils.

Currently supported containers:

• PSR complaint.

Serializer - Serializing (encoding) / De-serializing (decoding) job payloads with a custom serializer

You are able to serializer / de-serialize a job payload via a custom serializer such as JMS serializer (jms/serializer) and Symfony Serializer.

This allows you to better control the final object of the payload that will be registered to the queue or passed as payload to the job when it's being processed.

To do so you will have to use a container which has a key called job_serializer.

The serializer must implement the JobSerializerInterface.

See the demo for example of how it's actually done.

Note: The de-serializing process is a tad slower than the conventional & standard json_encode, json_decode way.

Currently supported containers:

• jms/serializer (via the CommonAdapters).

Definitions

• Manager/Queue Manager (sometimes referred to as Queue) - The manager that registers drivers, connect to the queue, pushes/seeds jobs to the queue.
• Seeder - A script that creates a job(s) and adds it to the queue.
• Worker - The worker that pulls jobs from queue, fire relevant events.
• Job - The work that needs to be done.
• Connection - A queue connection.
• Queue - A queue.
• Driver/Adapter - A driver is the way to interact with new queue type (e.g.: Beanstalkd, SQS, Redis, Database).
• Connector - A driver connector is the class that makes the connection between a queue configuration and a driver and generate an instance.
• Event - An event is fired when relevant stuff happens (such as job processed, job failed). You can listen to these events and interact with the queue while they occur.
• Queue Utils - sometimes it happens that a driver have implementation / ideas that other drivers don't share with it, this is the place to put them.

Best practices for background task management

• Why not daemonizing a PHP script? - PHP is not good for long background processes - read more: http://symcbean.blogspot.com/2010/02/php-and-long-running-processes.html
• Why not using crontab to run the worker? cron can only generate a worker each one minute at minimum.

MQ and Laravel Queues (illuminate/queue)

Main differences between MQ and Laravel Queues (illuminate/queue)

• Folder structure.
• Container can be null, not a must and not passed.
• QueueManager and Manager are combined into one class Manager.
• There is QueueUtils allowing you to handle specific driver/adapter functionalities/implementations.
• Event dispatcher is not a must - if no event dispatcher is used - a null dispatcher will be used.
• The way we register handlers.
• Worker->getNextJob() - public instead of private, because maybe you just want to peek on a job.
• Manager isDownForMaintenance instead of using Capsule.
• Manager addition of $drivers property, registerDefaultDrivers, registerDriver and configure functions.
• ExceptionHandlerInterface instead of using Symfony ExceptionHandler directly.
• In general - interfaces & null dummies for everything that isn't a must.
• Default of connection.
• FailingJob was merged to Worker->failJob.
• Str & Arr helper classes - took only needed functions.
• Allow usage of custom serializer/de-serializer for job encode/decode.

Structural difference

Was in place (illuminate/queue)	New place in MQ
Capsule\Manager / QueueManager	Core\Manager
Queue	Core\Queue
Worker	Core\Worker
WorkerOptions	Core\WorkerOptions

Missing implementations

• SerializesModels & SerializesAndRestoresModelIdentifiers traits - they are using Eloquent models and are specific for Laravel.

Contribute

Contribution is highly appreciated.

Please follow the Contribution Guide before contributing.

Here's what we are missing:

• Drivers/Adapters for different queue management (Database [without Doctrine or any other ORM, using PDO], etc..).
• Event Dispatcher Adapters for different event dispatcher libraries.
• Container Adapters for e.g.: Symfony, Laravel, Slim, Zend, Yii.
• Job Serializers Adapters e.g.: JMS Serializer, Symfony Serializer.
• Bundles for e.g.: Symfony, Laravel, Slim, Zend, Yii.
• Documentation.
• Testing.
• Making sure all the features of illuminate/queue work in here too.
• Battle test the library with different production scenarios.
• Remove the dependency of Carbon.
• Haven't yet actually tested SQS & Redis queues.

Fix required

• FailingJob is missing.
• Add redis as default driver.
• Check what is createObjectPayload in Queue and check if there's an illuminate dependency there that requires a conversion.