Get the new Laravel defer() helper today.

Update 29th Aug. 24:

Newton Job on Twitter pointed out that the dispatchAfterResponse function ALWAYS uses the sync queue driver - so you don't need to add the ->onConnection('sync') method.

From the docs:

This should typically only be used for jobs that take about a second, such as sending an email. Since they are processed within the current HTTP request, jobs dispatched in this fashion do not require a queue worker to be running in order for them to be processed

Original Post:

Laracon US has had its first day, and mixed in with the BIG announcements were some awesome little tidbits, including the new defer() helper, that allows you to push work into the background while sending a swift response to your users.

BUT, you can do this TODAY, but using the existing queue functionality (even if you don't have queues configured!).

Dispatch After Response.

The core of this is the dispatchAfterResponse method on queues, this example from the docs shows it off.

use App\Jobs\SendNotification;

SendNotification::dispatchAfterResponse();

The job won't be dispatched until AFTER the response has been sent to the user by NGINX.

But, you can also queue a closure:

dispatch(function () {
    Mail::to('taylor@example.com')->send(new WelcomeMessage);
})->afterResponse();

So we can do ANYTHING and dispatch it after the response has been sent, without having to create a job class for it.

But I don't have queues set up, and i don't want the fuss!

That's fine! If you've not got queues set up, you'll likely be using the QUEUE_CONNECTION=sync setting in your .env file anyway, that means this will JUST WORK straight away.

But I already have queues set up and I don't want to ACTUALLY push this to the queue.

Luckily, you can set the queue connection you want to dispatch things to at runtime, so do this!

dispatch(function () {
    Mail::to('taylor@example.com')->send(new WelcomeMessage);
})
    ->onConnection('sync')
    ->afterResponse();

And this will just run the job after the response is sent without adding it to your already existing queues.

Wrapping it in a helper.

All you need to do is to wrap this in a helper function to clean things up a bit, you can put helpers in a specific app/helpers.php file, and add it to composer.json in the autoload section:

"autoload": {
    "files": [
        "app/helpers.php"
    ],
    "psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/",
        "Database\\Factories\\": "database/factories/",
        "Database\\Seeders\\": "database/seeders/"
    }
},

Then run composer dumpautoload to load the file.

Now you can define the helper:

<?php # helpers.php

if (!function_exists('defer')) {
    function defer (Closure $toDefer) {
        dispatch($toDefer)
        ->onConnection('sync')
        ->afterResponse();
    }
}

And now you can use it in your code:

Route::get('/test', function() {
    defer(fn () => Log::info("This should be logged second"));
    Log::info("This should be logged first.");
    return view('welcome');
});

And there you go!