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symphoria/laravel-apex

A queue worker supervisor that scales workers to match the work.

It reads backlog straight out of the queue, decides how many processes each queue needs, and starts and retires them. Not a queue backend and not a replacement for one — that stays Laravel's redis or database driver.

What it does

Scales to actual zero. A queue with min_processes: 0 runs no processes at all when nothing is queued, and gets them back the moment work arrives. What stays behind is the master itself, one PHP process per installation, so idle queues cost nothing beyond it.

Keeps a warm pool while people are around. min_processes_when_active holds workers ready as long as there is human traffic, and drops back to the floor when there is not. Users never wait for a cold start; nights and weekends are free. Activity comes from a middleware that ignores your dashboard's own polling, so the monitoring screen cannot manufacture the load it displays.

Prevents boot storms. Spawning is throttled globally: at most max_concurrent_boots workers booting at once, spaced by boot_spawn_interval_ms. Without it, a queue going from 0 to 8 workers means eight simultaneous framework boots, and several installations doing that together will flatten a server.

Scales up now, down slowly. Growth is immediate. Shrinking waits out scale_down_debounce_seconds and a worker's shrink_min_lifetime_seconds, so a momentary dip cannot start a kill/spawn oscillation.

Bursts, but watches the machine. When a queue stays above its threshold long enough, Apex adds workers past the normal maximum — unless CPU is already above cpu_max_percent. One burst worker per tick, so the OS gets a chance to report the load its predecessor caused.

Profiles instead of per-queue guesswork. latency-critical, throughput and background set strategy, targets, memory, timeouts and retries in one word. Queues override individual keys, environments override queues.

Two scaling strategies. depth sizes on backlog; hybrid also watches how long the oldest job has been waiting, so a slow queue scales up before the backlog looks alarming.

Sub-50ms pickup on Redis 7+. With phpredis, workers block on BLMPOP across all their queues at once rather than polling each in turn. Falls back to polling automatically on older Redis, on predis, and on the database driver.

Runs without Redis. Redis, or the database, or one of each — see Running without Redis.

Answers what happened. Per-minute throughput history, a recent-jobs inspector with payloads and runtimes, worker lifecycle events, and live per-worker heartbeats — over JSON, so the UI stays yours.

Stops queues on your terms. Operators pause; your application suspends. Both scale to zero, both survive a restart, and they do not overwrite each other.

One supervisor per installation. A second apex:start refuses and tells you which host and pid holds the lock, because two masters cannot see each other's workers and would scale the same queues past every maximum. --force takes over, and a killed master's claim lapses on its own.

Install

Migrations are loaded, not published. Publishing them makes you the owner of the schema from that moment on, so later column additions never reach you.

Configuring a queue

A profile supplies everything you did not: strategy, targets, memory limit, timeouts, retries. php artisan apex:config:show prints what every queue actually resolved to after profile, queue and environment have been merged.

Running without Redis

Apex uses two backends, and it is worth keeping them apart:

• The queue is Laravel's. Apex reads pending work straight out of it to decide how many workers to run, which it can do for the redis and database drivers. Any other driver offers no way to ask "how much is waiting", so apex:start refuses it.
• The store is where Apex keeps its own coordination state: worker heartbeats, pause flags, counters and the job timelines behind the dashboard.

By default the store follows the queue driver, so neither needs configuring:

"No Redis" means both. Setting APEX_STORE=database while QUEUE_CONNECTION=redis still requires a Redis server — the store moved, the queue did not.

The two are configurable separately because the combination is occasionally what you want:

php artisan apex:config:show prints the active store, the depth probe, and for each timing setting whether the effective value was configured or inherited from the store's default.

What it costs

Every operation is a query instead of a pipelined Redis command, so the master ticks more slowly on the database store: 1s instead of 250ms, 5s instead of 1s when idle. Those are defaults per store; APEX_TICK_INTERVAL_MS and APEX_IDLE_TICK_INTERVAL_MS override them.

Job pickup latency is unaffected. A warm worker takes a job off the queue itself; the master's tick only decides whether to add or remove workers. What a slower tick costs you is scale-up speed on a cold pool.

Redis is still the better backend under load, and BLMPOP (Redis 7+) gives sub-50ms pickup that database polling cannot match. The database store exists so that Apex is usable at all where Redis is not, not to be equivalent.

There is no file driver, and there will not be one: it means writing your own locking, which fails differently on Windows and silently on network shares. If you want "one file, no daemon", point APEX_DB_CONNECTION at a SQLite connection with WAL enabled.

Access to the control API

The package ships a JSON API that can pause queues and flush failed jobs, so access is denied outside local by default. Same model Horizon uses, and for the same reason.

Open it in one of two ways:

The package deliberately ships no screen. It owns the data and the control actions; you own the UI. Endpoints live under config('apex.dashboard.path'), default apex:

Set apex.dashboard.enabled to false and no routes are registered at all.

Suspending queues from your own code

A queue can be stopped for reasons Apex knows nothing about — a disabled feature, a tenant over quota, a maintenance window. Implement one method:

Group related queues in config so you can suspend them as a unit:

Suspension is not the same as a pause. A pause is an operator action Apex stores itself and rehydrates after a Redis flush. A suspension is derived state owned by your application; the master reconciles it on boot and clears any that no longer apply.

If you only need Laravel's own queue:pause to scale Apex down to zero, bind the shipped adapter instead:

It needs Queue::getPausedQueues() (Laravel 13.25+) and returns an empty array on older versions. A group counts as suspended only when every queue it reads is paused, so queue:pause on one of two queues leaves the group running — there is still work arriving on the other. queue:pause --all suspends everything.

Overriding a model

Your class must extend Symphoria\Apex\Models\QueueState. The resolver validates that and throws InvalidConfiguration with a usable message if it does not.

QueueState::pausedBy() is polymorphic, so the package never has to know your user model. Register a morph alias for whatever you store there — a raw FQCN in the database breaks the first time somebody renames the class.

Public API

Covered by semver: everything in src/Contracts/ and src/Exceptions/, the Apex resolver, config keys, model attributes and relation names, table names, route names, and the documented artisan commands.

Everything else is internal and may change within a major.

Coming from Horizon

Both supervise workers, and for a single application with steady traffic Horizon is the easier answer: it ships a dashboard, it is first-party, and you already know it.

Apex exists for the case Horizon's balanceMaxShift/balanceCooldown model does not cover: many installations sharing one machine, most of them idle most of the time. Horizon's minimum is one process per queue and it has no notion of the machine as a whole, so twenty idle installations cost twenty times a worker that has nothing to do, and they will all boot at once when they wake. Apex's floor is genuinely zero, spawning is throttled globally, and bursting yields to CPU pressure.

What you give up: the dashboard (Apex ships JSON and no screen), and first-party support.

Requirements

PHP 8.3+, Laravel 13.26+, and a queue on the redis or database driver. Redis 7+ additionally enables BLMPOP pickup. See Running without Redis.

Development

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md covers how to run the suite, what gets merged, and the few rules in the master loop that look arbitrary and are not.

Code of conduct

So that this stays a place people want to contribute to, please read and follow the code of conduct.

Security

Found a vulnerability? Do not open an issue. Use private vulnerability reporting. See the security policy.

Credits

Built at Symphoria B.V., extracted from the supervisor that runs our own installations.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.