laravel-process-async

Utilize Laravel Processes to run PHP code asynchronously.

What really is this?

Laravel Processes was first introduced in Laravel 10. This library wraps around Process::start() to let you execute code in the background to achieve async, albeit with some caveats:

• You may only execute PHP code
• Restrictions from laravel/serializable-closure apply (see their README)
• Hands-off execution: no built-in result-checking, check the results yourself (e.g. via database, file cache, etc)

Why should I want this?

This library is very helpful for these cases:

• You want a minimal-setup async for easy vertical scaling
• You want to start quick-and-dirty async tasks right now (e.g. prefetching resources, pinging remote, etc.)
  • Best is if your task only has very few lines of code
• Laravel 11 Concurrency is too limiting; e.g.:
  • You want to do something else while waiting for results

Of course, if you are considering extreme scaling (e.g. Redis queues in Laravel, multi-worker clusters, etc.) or guaranteed task execution, then this library is obviously not for you.

Installation

via Composer:

composer require vectorial1024/laravel-process-async

This library supports Unix and Windows; see the Testing section for more details.

Change log

Please see CHANGELOG.md.

Example code

Tasks can be defined as PHP closures, or (recommended) as an instance of a class that implements AsyncTaskInterface.

A very simple example task to write Hello World to a file:

// define the task...
$target = "document.txt";
$task = new AsyncTask(function () use ($target) {
    $fp = fopen($target, "w");
    fwrite($fp, "Hello World!!");
    fflush($fp);
    fclose($fp);
});

// if you are using interfaces, then it is just like this:
// $task = new AsyncTask(new WriteToFileTask($target, $message));

// then start it.
$task->start();

// the task is now run in another PHP process, and will not report back to this PHP process.

Testing

PHPUnit via Composer script:

composer run-script test

Latest cross-platform testing results:

Runtime	MacOS	Ubuntu	Windows
Laravel 10 (PHP 8.1)	skipped*	skipped*	skipped*
Laravel 11 (PHP 8.2)
Laravel 12 (PHP ???)	🛠️	🛠️	🛠️

*Note: tests for these Laravel versions are skipped because they have old artisan file contents:

• It is difficult to mock multi-version artisan files for different Laravel versions (see #6).
• It is rare for the artisan file at Laravel to be updated
• The actual behavior is expected to be the same.