Laravel provides a queue interface to help you defer long-running tasks such as sending emails/SMS, file processing, etc. As much as you try to avoid it, your queue will fail sometimes and because these failures are ignored by default, you need a way to be notified. In this article, we will explore how to send a Slack notification each time a queue fails.

Pre-requisites

• Existing Laravel Application
• Understanding of Laravel Queues
• A Slack Hook URL

Before Laravel 5.8.x, the Slack notification channel was pre-packaged into the framework. If your Laravel version is < 5.8.0, feel free to skip the installation (although you should look into upgrading as Laravel is currently on version 6.0). From Laravel 5.8.x and above, the Slack notification channel is packaged separately from the framework so we have to import it via:

Next, update your .env file to include your Slack webhook URL …

Queues are ways in which we enable our application to listen and act based on predefined events. They allow us to delay tasks that would otherwise interfere with the user experience or our application’s performance.  

From the Laravel docs, "Laravel queues provide a unified API across a variety of different queue backends, such as Beanstalk, Amazon SQS, Redis, or even a relational database."

What are we Building?

In this tutorial, we will be creating an application that utilizes Laravel queues to send our users “Happy Birthday” messages on their birthday. We will create a command that fetches all users whose birthdays are today, and sends them to the queue to be processed.

Pre-requisites

• Basic understanding of the Laravel framework
• Composer
• A Twilio Account and Twilio SDK credentials

Setting Up our Application

As our application is Laravel-based, we will create a new Laravel application. If you're not …