Laravel and Scheduled Jobs on Heroku

Creating the Job

First, I want to create a job that sends the email.

php artisan make:job SendReminderEmail --sync

This command will generate a new class in the app/Jobs directory. --sync overwrites the default queue implmentation. Starting with Laravel 5.2, make:job defaults to queued jobs so whenever dispatch() is called, the job will end up in your queue. For my job, I didn't want it queued. I wanted it to run and be done.

Simple enough. My handle() method simply sends the email.

<?php

namespace App\Jobs;

use App\User;
use App\Jobs\Job;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Mail\Mailer;

class SendReminderEmail extends Job
{

    protected $user;

    /**
     * Create a new job instance.
     *
     * @param  User $user
     * @return void
     */
    public function __construct(User $user)
    {
        $this->user = $user;
    }

    /**
     * Execute the job.
     *
     * @param  Mailer $mailer
     * @return void
     */
    public function handle(Mailer $mailer)
    {
        $mailer->send('emails.reminder', ['user' => $this->user], function ($m) {
            $m->to($this->user->email, "$this->user->first $this->user->last")->subject('Hey, you haven\'t finished your registration!');
        });
    }
}

Create php artisan console command

Now I want my scheduler to call this job every so often. The scheduler needs some way to run it, so I went created an artisan command that can be ran from the terminal.

php artisan make:console SendEmails --command=emails:send

This generates a class at app/Console/Commands/SendEmails.php. The --command option assigns the terminal command name.

SendEmails finds all users that need an email to be sent, and dispatches the SendReminderEmail job.

Scheduler on Heroku

Now to get the scheduler up on Heroku.

heroku addons:create scheduler:standard

I logged into my app's Heroku dashboard. I set the frequency to every 10 minutes with the following command:

php artisan emails:send

And to test if your artisan command is working properly:

heroku run php artisan emails:send

I started seeing emails in my inbox, nice! Now for some fine tuning.