Create Scheduled Tasks With Laravel

In this tutorial we’re going to learn how to setup and use scheduled tasks with Laravel to perform the same tasks on a regular timescale.

To use scheduled tasks in Laravel it will use your server cron jobs. What makes this different to just setting up a cron jobs is that Laravel will only have on entry in your cron job setup.

Before if you want to create a scheduled task you will have to setup each task as it’s own cron job, with Laravel you only need to do this once.

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

Define Jobs

To define your scheduled jobs you need to use the app/Console/Kernel.php file and add a method for schedule.

/** 
 * Define the application's command schedule. 
 * 
 * @param \Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule $schedule 
 * @return void 
 */ 
protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule) 
{ 
}

There are a few ways you can run different bits of code off the Schedule class using the following methods.

• command — To run an artisan command
• call — To run a callback function
• job — To dispatch a specific job.
• exec — To execute a specific shell command

When Tasks Will Run

You can fully customise when to run the command defined on the scheduler. You can select to define a cron settings, run every X minutes, run hourly, run daily, run weekly, run monthly etc.

Running a Command Daily

Below is the example code you will use to run an artisan command every day.

<?php 
namespace App\Console; 
use App\Console\Commands\ArtisanCommand; 
use Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule; 
use Illuminate\Foundation\Console\Kernel as ConsoleKernel; 
class Kernel extends ConsoleKernel 
{ 
   /** 
    * The Artisan commands provided by your application. 
    * 
    * @var array 
    */ 
    protected $commands = [ 
        ArtisanCommand::class 
    ]; 
   /** 
    * Define the application's command schedule. 
    * 
    * @param \Illuminate\Console\Scheduling\Schedule $schedule 
    * @return void 
    */ 
    protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule) 
    { 
        $schedule->command(ArtisanCommand::class)->daily(); 
    } 
}

This uses the $schedule class to run a command ->command($commandClassName) then we set it to run ->daily(), which will run everyday at midnight.

Originally published at https://paulund.co.uk.