Introduction:
In today’s busy world, It is important to automate tasks is essential to improve productivity and efficiency. Laravel, a popular PHP framework, provides a powerful task scheduling feature that allows developers to automate various processes within their applications. In this blog post, we will explore task scheduling in Laravel and provide an example to demonstrate its usage and benefits.

Understanding Task Scheduling :
Laravel’s task scheduling allows you to define and run tasks at specific intervals or according to a set schedule. It leverages the built-in cron job functionality of the operating system to execute scheduled tasks automatically. This feature is particularly useful for performing recurring tasks like sending emails, generating reports, clearing caches, or updating data.

Setting up Task Scheduling:
To start using task scheduling in Laravel, you need to perform a few simple steps:

1). Open the App\Console\Kernel.php file in your Laravel project. Inside the schedule method, you can define your scheduled tasks. Let’s add an example task that clears the cache every hour:

PHP

protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule) { $schedule->command('cache:clear')->hourly(); }

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protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
{
    $schedule->command('cache:clear')->hourly();
}

2). Generate a new command by running the following command in your terminal:

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php artisan make:command ClearCacheCommand

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php artisan make:command ClearCacheCommand

This will create a new file named ClearCacheCommand.php in the app/Console/Commands directory.

3). Open the ClearCacheCommand.php file and update the handle method with the code to clear the cache. For example, you can use the Cache facade to clear the cache:

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<?php use Illuminate\Console\Command; use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache; class ClearCacheCommand extends Command { protected $signature = 'cache:clear'; protected $description = 'Clear the application cache'; public function handle() { Cache::flush(); $this->info('Cache cleared successfully!'); } } ?>

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<?php

use Illuminate\Console\Command;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache;

class ClearCacheCommand extends Command
{
    protected $signature = 'cache:clear';
    protected $description = 'Clear the application cache';

    public function handle()
    {
        Cache::flush();
        $this->info('Cache cleared successfully!');
    }
}

?>

4). To make the command available for execution, You need to register it in the App\Console\Kernel.php file. Add the following line inside the commands array:

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protected $commands = [ Commands\ClearCacheCommand::class, ];

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protected $commands = [
    Commands\ClearCacheCommand::class,
];

5). Configure a cron job on your server to execute Laravel’s task scheduler. Open your server’s crontab file by running the following command:

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crontab -e

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crontab -e

6). Add the following line to the crontab file to run the scheduled tasks every minute:

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

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

Now we are going to test the Task Scheduler:
Once everything is set up, the cache will be cleared automatically every hour. You can monitor the task scheduler by checking the Laravel logs or running the following command in your terminal:

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php artisan schedule:list

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php artisan schedule:list

This command will display a list of scheduled tasks and their next run time.

By using Laravel’s task scheduling feature, you can automate repetitive tasks in your Laravel project, such as clearing cache or generating reports. This simplifies the process and improves the efficiency of your application.

For further reading see the Laravel 10 Docs Task Scheduling.

Thanks for reading this blog. Please comment below if you have any question. Also you can hire laravel developers for your custom laravel projects. kindly explore our extensions.