Laravel scheduler on Heroku

The Laravel scheduler is a great feature that removes the hassle of managing cron tasks, letting you handling everything in your app. Heroku is a great platform that relieves you of having to look after your own infrastructure. However getting the two to work together isn't quite perfect.

Heroku offers the Heroku Scheduler add-on which can perform calls into your app on demand, however it is limited to running at most every 10 minutes. This might be fine if your schedule isn't particularly heavy, but it's just one annoyance that would be nice to get rid of.

Luckily there is a work-around - Heroku has documentation on custom clock processes for when you need more fine-grained controller over time based tasks. They have example implemenations for Python and Java, but not PHP.

Here is a command you can add to your app and your Procfile which will let your scheduler run every minute. Effectively you will boot up another stack in your app - just choose a smaller dyno size if you can - and prompt the scheduler when required. You have the option to call it more or less frequently if you need.

<?php

namespace App\Console\Commands;

use Carbon\Carbon;
use Illuminate\Console\Command;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Artisan;

class SchedulerDaemon extends Command
{
    /**
     * The name and signature of the console command.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    protected $signature = 'schedule:daemon {--sleep=60}';

    /**
     * The console command description.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    protected $description = 'Call the scheduler every minute.';

    /**
     * Execute the console command.
     *
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function handle()
    {
        while (true) {
            $this->line('<info>[' . Carbon::now()->format('Y-m-d H:i:s') . ']</info> Calling scheduler');

            $this->call('schedule:run');

            sleep($this->option('sleep'));
        }
    }
}

Then add this line to your Procfile which will tell Heroku to launch an additional stack and run the daemon for you.

scheduler: php artisan schedule:daemon