Using Queues on Shared Hosting with Laravel

When all you have is CRON

Sometimes, shared hosting must be used that does not permit the installation of supervisor to run the queue worker.

A common example of this are servers deployed with Cpanel access only.

One approach for non-time sensitive queue work (such as sending emails) is to add a task to the scheduler that starts the queue worker every minute;

$schedule->command('queue:work --stop-when-empty')
             ->everyMinute()
             ->withoutOverlapping();

Adding this line to the scheduler in app\Console\Kernel.php and then setting up a cron job to run the scheduler, ensures that the queue gets serviced every minute.

For Cpanel servers, the Cron statement might look like;

* * * * * /usr/local/bin/php /home/{account_name}/live/artisan schedule:run

where {account_name} is the user account that cpanel is running under and live is the folder of the laravel application