Laravel Queue Tutorial for Beginners (2025): Step-by-Step Guide to Jobs, Workers, Failures & Queue

Learn how to use Laravel Queues to offload time-consuming tasks like email sending, image processing, or API requests. This beginner-friendly 2025 tutorial walks you through setting up queues, jobs, workers, and handling failures — all step by step.

📦 What Are Laravel Queues?

Laravel Queues allow you to defer the execution of a task until later. This improves the performance of your application and user experience — especially for long-running operations like email sending, notifications, or third-party API calls.

🚀 When Should You Use Queues?

• Sending emails without slowing down user interactions
• Generating PDFs, reports, or invoices
• Dispatching jobs to external APIs
• Delayed or batched notifications
• Video or image processing

⚙️ Step 1: Queue Configuration

Laravel supports multiple queue drivers:

• Database (for development)
• Redis
• Amazon SQS
• Beanstalkd

Update your .env:

QUEUE_CONNECTION=database

Then run:

php artisan queue:table
php artisan migrate

🛠 Step 2: Create a Job

php artisan make:job ProcessPodcast

Edit the handle() method inside the new ProcessPodcast class:

public function handle()
{
    // logic to process a podcast file
}

📤 Step 3: Dispatch the Job

You can dispatch jobs from anywhere in Laravel:

ProcessPodcast::dispatch($podcast);

👷 Step 4: Run the Worker

To start processing jobs:

php artisan queue:work

You can also use:

php artisan queue:work --tries=3 --timeout=60 --queue=default

💥 Handling Job Failures

Track failed jobs:

php artisan queue:failed-table
php artisan migrate

View failed jobs:

php artisan queue:failed

Retry failed jobs:

php artisan queue:retry all

🧼 Clear Queues (optional)

If you're testing and want to clear all queued jobs:

php artisan queue:clear

🧪 Testing Jobs in Laravel

Test your jobs in Laravel using:

Queue::fake();
Queue::assertPushed(ProcessPodcast::class);

✅ Final Tips for Laravel Queues

• Use Redis or SQS in production
• Monitor workers with Supervisor or Laravel Horizon
• Group related jobs using queues and tags
• Use try/catch inside handle() to catch exceptions gracefully

👨‍💻 Ready to Scale?

Laravel Queues are essential when your app starts growing. Whether it’s email automation, background processing, or improving UX speed — queues help your app stay fast, responsive, and efficient.

Need help scaling your Laravel project or configuring advanced queue systems?
Contact me here →