Keep Your Laravel Queue Running on Shared Hosting (Because Supervisors are for Quitters)

Your Laravel app needs to send emails, process images, sync data — all the boring stuff that'll freeze your request if you do it synchronously. Enter queues. But there's a catch: shared hosting doesn't have supervisor (cry). So you'll use nohup — the Unix equivalent of telling a process, "keep running, I'm leaving now."

The 30-Second Setup

SSH into your server and run this one-liner:

Done. Your queue is now running in the background. The process will keep working even after you disconnect.

What Did I Just Do?

• nohup = "don't kill this when I log out"
• --timeout=60 = kill jobs that take longer than 60 seconds (prevent zombies)
• --sleep=3 = check for new jobs every 3 seconds (balance CPU vs. responsiveness)
• >> storage/logs/queue-worker.log 2>&1 = dump all output to a log file
• & = run in background

It'll print your process ID (PID). Save it somewhere safe — you'll need it to kill the worker later.

Is It Actually Running?

Check if it's alive:

Or stalk the logs in real time:

If you see jobs being processed, congrats — you're a queue wizard now.

The Crash Problem (aka Auto-Restart)

Here's the thing: your queue worker might crash. Database locks, memory leaks, cosmic rays — who knows. On shared hosting, there's no supervisor to restart it automatically. So use a cron job watchdog.

Create a file called check-queue.sh in your project root:

Make it executable:

Then add it to crontab (runs every 5 minutes):

Add this line:

Now if your worker dies, it automatically restarts within 5 minutes. You're basically letting a robot babysit your queue.

How to Kill It (When Things Go Wrong)

Find the PID:

Kill it gracefully:

Or nuke it from orbit (if graceful doesn't work):

Then restart:

Common Disasters & How to Fix Them

❌ "Command not found: php"

Use the full path: nohup /usr/bin/php artisan queue:work .... Find it with which php.

❌ Worker stops after one job

Check the logs: tail -50 storage/logs/queue-worker.log. Probably a database connection timeout or missing env vars.

❌ Too many queue processes running

You started it three times by accident. Kill all PHP processes (carefully): killall php. Or kill specific PIDs one by one.

❌ Server rebooted, queue is gone

You need to manually restart it or add a cron job that runs hourly to ensure it stays alive.

The Cheat Sheet

That's it. Your Laravel queue is now running 24/7 on budget shared hosting. No fancy services, no Supervisor, just good old Unix magic and a cron job babysitter. Sleep soundly.