Tagged: DevOps

"But it worked locally." The Laravel scheduler is the duct tape of every production app I've worked on. It triggers the reports, cleans up expired data, pings the health checks, rotates the tokens, sends the digests. It works quietly for weeks, then one morning the team realises nothing has run for six days and nobody got an alert. If you've already read my queue worker version of this list, the scheduler has its own set of silent failure modes. Every one below cost me or a client real money or real trust. None of them show up in php artisan schedule:list. All of them are avoidable once you know where to look. Examples target Laravel 11 and later (so routes/console.php and bootstrap/app.php). On Laravel 10 and earlier, the same calls live in the schedule() method of App\Console\Kernel.

Your queue works perfectly in local. Every job dispatches, processes, and completes without a hitch. Then you deploy to production with real traffic, real concurrency, and real third-party APIs, and things start breaking in ways your test suite never predicted. I've been running Laravel queues in production for years across multiple applications. Every failure on this list caught me off guard at least once. Not because the documentation doesn't cover them, but because you don't think about them until they bite you at 2 AM.

I've been deploying Laravel applications for over a decade. Started with custom bash scripts. Moved to Laravel Envoy. Then Laravel Envoyer, which worked great for a long time. Eventually moved away from it to Ploi.io so I could manage deployments and servers in one place. Each tool taught me something the previous one didn't. And the biggest lesson wasn't about tools at all. It was about the small practices around deployment that separate "mostly works" from "actually works every time." Zero-downtime deployment is widely available now. Most hosting panels and deployment services support it out of the box. But to get the most out of it, there are practices you need to get right. That's what this post covers.