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Station

A Laravel Horizon alternative with multi-driver support and enhanced job recovery.

Station replaces Horizon as your queue management and monitoring layer. Your existing Laravel queue code works unchanged — the only difference is running php artisan station:work instead of php artisan horizon.

Station hooks into Laravel's queue event system to transparently track every job, batch, and workflow through a real-time dashboard.

Resources: Upgrade Guide

What Station Provides

• Multi-driver support — RabbitMQ, Redis, SQS, Beanstalkd, Kafka
• Seamless job tracking — Every dispatch() call is recorded automatically
• Batch monitoring — Real-time progress for Bus::batch() with integer failure thresholds
• Workflow engine — Multi-step DAG workflows with conditions, branching, and pause/resume
• Job recovery — Checkpointing for long-running jobs, stuck job detection, automatic recovery
• Real-time dashboard — Inertia.js + Vue 3 UI with 3-second auto-refresh
• Built-in observability — Prometheus metrics, health checks, multi-channel alerting (Slack, Discord, Teams, email, webhooks)
• Alerting — Configurable alert rules with multi-channel notifications (Slack, Discord, Teams, email, webhooks, log)
• Security — Job encryption, payload masking, audit logging, gate-based authorization

For a detailed comparison with Horizon, see Station vs Horizon.

Requirements

• PHP 8.3+ (8.4 recommended)
• Laravel 11.x or 12.x
• ext-pcntl, ext-posix

Driver-specific: ext-amqp (RabbitMQ), ext-redis or predis (Redis), aws/aws-sdk-php (SQS), pda/pheanstalk (Beanstalkd), ext-rdkafka (Kafka)

Dashboard: inertiajs/inertia-laravel (optional — required only for the web dashboard)

Installation

Set your queue connection in .env:

Start the supervisor:

Access the dashboard at /station.

Jobs

Standard Laravel dispatch is tracked automatically — no code changes needed:

Station also provides a fluent API with tags and priority:

Station records processing time, memory usage, attempts, wait time, and status for every job.

Batches

Station wraps Laravel's native Bus::batch() with enhanced tracking. Jobs must use the Batchable trait:

Create and monitor batches:

For details on the overlay table strategy and atomic counter tracking, see Batches Architecture.

Workflows

Simple Workflows

A DAG wrapper around Bus::batch() — define steps with dependencies, Station resolves execution order:

Steps with no dependencies between them run in parallel.

Full Workflow Engine

Persistent workflows with conditional steps, branching, and pause/resume:

Workflow instances are stored in the database with full state tracking, and can be paused, resumed, or cancelled from the dashboard.

For details on execution model, branching, and context propagation, see Workflows Architecture.

Workflows vs Laravel Bus

Station's workflow engine provides DAG orchestration beyond what Laravel's built-in Bus::batch() and Bus::chain() can express:

Station workflows support both synchronous (Workflow::run()) and asynchronous (Workflow::runAsync()) execution. In async mode, each step is dispatched as a standard ShouldQueue job processed by Laravel workers, enabling true parallel execution across multiple workers. The orchestration layer (dependency resolution, conditional evaluation, context propagation) is where Station adds value on top of Laravel's primitives.

Job Recovery

Checkpointing

Long-running jobs can save progress and resume after failures:

Stuck Job Detection

Station detects hung jobs using weighted scoring (heartbeat, runtime, memory, process state) and can recover them automatically:

For details on scoring, strategies, and health checks, see Recovery System.

Artisan Commands

Dashboard

Real-time monitoring UI at /station with auto-refresh every 3 seconds:

• Overview — Job throughput, failure rate, average processing time, active workers
• Jobs — Paginated list with status/queue/class filters, retry and delete actions
• Failed Jobs — Exception details, retry individually or in bulk
• Batches — Progress bars, status tracking, cancel and retry
• Workflows — Definitions, running instances, step-by-step progress
• Monitoring — Queue depths, worker counts, throughput charts
• Metrics — Historical data with time range selection

Authorization

By default, the dashboard is accessible in local environment. In other environments, configure the authorization gate in config/station.php:

Then define the gate in your AuthServiceProvider:

API

Full REST API at /api/station/ (configurable) with Bearer token auth. See docs/openapi.yaml for the OpenAPI 3.1 specification.

Configuration

For the full configuration reference, see Configuration.

Documentation

For in-depth documentation, see the docs/ directory:

• Architecture — Internal architecture: jobs, batches, workflows, workers, recovery, metrics, database schema, Station vs Horizon
• Queue Drivers — Feature matrix, per-driver configs, known limitations
• Facades — All 7 facades with every public method
• Security & Resilience — API auth, encryption, masking, alerting, circuit breaker
• Configuration — Full config reference and environment variables
• Migrating from Horizon — Step-by-step migration guide and feature mapping
• API Reference — OpenAPI 3.1 specification

Development Setup

Station includes a Docker environment with all queue drivers pre-configured:

See docker/README.md for Docker environment details, and the Makefile for all available commands.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup, code style guidelines (PER-CS 3.0), and testing requirements (95% coverage).

Security

For security vulnerabilities, please see SECURITY.md. Do not report security issues via GitHub Issues.

License

Station is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.