How to Schedule Tasks in Laravel 11 Application

Laravel provides a convenient way to schedule tasks using its built-in Task Scheduling feature. Task scheduling allows you to execute Laravel Artisan commands periodically within your application. Let’s go through a practical example to see how to schedule tasks in Laravel:

Step 1: Define Your Task

For this example, let’s create a task that will delete all expired tokens from the database.

First, create a new Artisan command using the following command:

php artisan make:command ClearExpiredTokens

This command will generate a new file ClearExpiredTokens.php in the app/Console/Commands directory.

Open ClearExpiredTokens.php and implement the logic to clear expired tokens:

<?php

namespace App\Console\Commands;

use Illuminate\Console\Command;
use App\Models\Token;

class ClearExpiredTokens extends Command
{
    protected $signature = 'tokens:clear';

    protected $description = 'Clear expired tokens';

    public function handle()
    {
        Token::where('expiration_date', '<', now())->delete();
        $this->info('Expired tokens cleared successfully.');
    }
}

Step 2: Schedule the Task

Now, open the app/Console/Kernel.php file and define your scheduled tasks in the schedule method.

<?php

namespace App\Console;

use Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Console\Kernel as ConsoleKernel;

class Kernel extends ConsoleKernel
{
    protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
    {
        $schedule->command('tokens:clear')->daily();
    }

    protected function commands()
    {
        $this->load(__DIR__.'/Commands');

        require base_path('routes/console.php');
    }
}

In this example, we scheduled the tokens:clear command to run daily.

Step 3: Running the Scheduler

To run the scheduled tasks, you need to add the following Cron entry to your server.

* * * * * cd /path-to-your-project && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

This Cron entry will call the Laravel command scheduler every minute. The scheduler will then execute tasks as needed.

Step 4: Testing

To test if the scheduled task is working, you can manually run the scheduler using the following command:

php artisan schedule:run

This command will execute all the scheduled tasks defined in your Kernel class.

That’s it! Now, your Laravel application will automatically clear expired tokens from the database on a daily basis.