Automating Business Processes Using Laravel Advanced Task Scheduling

Introduction

We are in the midst of a digital transformation era. Businesses are keen to use software to automate their various business processes, which are becoming increasingly complex daily. If your PHP business application has a built-in Laravel framework, Laravel automation is the key for Laravel development services to empower the application with automation capabilities.

A Laravel development company can use Laravel’s advanced task scheduling feature to enable task automation to ease many repetitive jobs, such as sending regular reports and notifications, managing database maintenance and backup, and much more.

What Is Laravel Task Scheduling?

Laravel facilitates Laravel developers in creating task scheduling directly in the code instead of manually configuring CRON jobs for each task in the PHP application. The task scheduling feature in Laravel is built on the foundation of the CRON daemon, which is a time-based job scheduler in UNIX-like OS.

Types of Tasks in Laravel Task Scheduling

We can categorize Laravel application tasks into two main types:

1.Web Application Tasks

They are frontend logic phenomena that are tightly coupled with user interactions of events triggered in the web application. You can define automated actions or background processes that seamlessly follow these events. For instance, a user will receive a welcome email after a successful registration attempt.

2.Background Tasks

They operate periodically in the background. They are independent of any user action. They are primarily mission-critical in maintaining the smooth operations of the application and, for example, scheduling daily automated backups of the application database.

Laravel expert developers at Jeel Techsoft strategically automate your business tasks in the Laravel application and streamline workflow.

Advantages of Laravel Task Scheduling

Many Laravel development services reap the benefits of Laravel automation capability. Those advantages are:

Laravel Automation

Your scheduled repetitive tasks will run automatically in the background of the application. So, you need not bear the burden of executing them manually. Thus, it increases the responsiveness and performance of Laravel applications through Laravel automation.

Enhanced Maintainability

With Laravel task scheduling, you centralize task definition in the codebase. You keep scheduling logic along with application code and allow interactions between them. Thus, it will enhance code organization and simplify code maintenance in the coming days.

Flexibility

• You can find a wide range of task scheduling options in the Laravel task scheduler.

• You can define a specific time and date to run tasks.

• You can schedule tasks to run at regular intervals or trigger them based on specific events.

How Does Laravel Task Scheduling Work?

1.Define Schedule Tasks

You can apply the schedule method in the console kernel of the Laravel application using the fluent API. Thus, you can specify the tasks you want to execute in the application with an expected schedule.

2.Schedule Options

Laravel offers different scheduling options. Thus, using any of them, you can define tasks to run on specific days or at regular intervals, such as hourly, daily, weekly, or custom period/intervals.

3.Centralized CRON Jobs

You can run the artisan command manually to trigger the Laravel scheduler periodically despite defining tasks in Laravel.

How to Schedule Tasks in Laravel?

Step 1: Define Tasks in Laravel

Laravel has a built-in task scheduler to automate tasks in Laravel instead of managing cron jobs manually. Your Laravel developer or Laravel development team can define schedules directly in Laravel code by following the steps given below.

Write an Artisan Command

Your Laravel programmer can create an artisan command using the “PHP artisan make command.” The command has logic for your Laravel task scheduling.

Define the Schedule in Console or kernel.php

Laravel provides different methods to define the schedule in the kernel.php file. For instance

• Hourly () – To run tasks once every hour.

• Daily () – To run tasks once every day.

• Cron (‘* ’) – It applies standard cron syntax for more granular scheduling.

Schedule Queued Jobs

Laravel offers a queue system to schedule heavy-duty tasks in the Laravel application.

Step 2: Create Tasks in Laravel

After defining the task schedule, you can create the actual code to run tasks in the Laravel application. For that, you can take two different approaches, such as

1 – Use Artisan Command for Complex Tasks

You can deal with complex logic in the model and functionality of the application by creating Artisan Command, which will encapsulate the task logic, making it maintainable and reusable.

• 1.Open the generated command file.

• 2.Use the handle method of the command class to implement the task logic. It will be executed while the task runs.

2 – Use Closures for Simple Tasks

You can define the task logic within a closure passed to the schedule method in the kernel.php file.

Step 3: Use Laravel Scheduler to Schedule Tasks

The next step is integrating the Laravel scheduling system using the schedule method within the console or kernel.php file, which provides different options.

1.Predefined Methods – hourly (), daily (), and cron ().

2.Custom Scheduling – You can create custom schedules, such as

• A.Every Minute

• B.Every Five Minute

• C.Every Ten Minute

• D.Every Six Hours

• E.Weekly()

• F.Monthly()

Step – 4: Configure CRON Job

Laravel scheduler is not working in some scenarios, such as

• 1.Have an external script in the application.

• 2.When the Laravel application runs in a shared hosting environment, limitations might not support the scheduler.

In such a scenario,Laravel application developers must manually configure cron jobs. Let’s see the steps to configure cron jobs.

Access the server: Common SSH (Secure Shell) clients, including PUTTY in Windows and Terminal in Linux/Mac, help Laravel programmers establish a connection to the server.

Crontab Editing:The Crontab file stores the cronjob definition, and you can use the crontab-e commerce command to edit it. You can use Nano, vim, or any preferred text editor.

Cron job Entry Addition: You can add a line specifying the schedule and command for the task, such as Minute, Hour, Day of month, Month, and Day of the week.

Save & Exit: Save your changes to the crontab file and exit.

Final Thought

We learned what Laravel task scheduling is, the different types of tasks you can schedule in Laravel application, benefits of using Laravel task scheduling feature, how Laravel task scheduling works, and how to schedule tasks in the Laravel application development project.

Of course, an expert and experienced Laravel development company, such as Jeel Techsoft, can provide competent Laravel development services at competitive market rates with a promised time-to-market schedule. Let’s discuss your requirements with our Laravel development team.