Laravel Horizon not executing pending jobs - Kubernetes and Docker environment

Question

We have two different pods in Kube.netes for our Laravel app,

• one running apache serving on port 80, (CMD /usr/sbin/apache2ctl -D FOREGROUND)
• and another running worker (Laravel Horizon) (CMD php /var/www/artisan horizon)

The issue is when I check the horizon dashboard, it says 'Active', and I can see the Jobs in the 'Pending Jobs' section, but they never actually execute. They are just sitting there idle.

Now, when I SSH in the pod running apache and manually and run the command 'php artisan horizon' than it actually executes all pending jobs.

I have already ensured the followings:

1. Both the pods are connected with the same Redis database service
2. Horizon Prefix is the same for both the pods

Answer 1

Double check your APP_ENV matches one of the environments in the horizon.php config. Otherwise horizon will not start any queue workers.

By default only local and production environments are provided:

https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/horizon#environments

Answer 2

After struggling for days, I got the answer to this problem.

While using Redis as a cache, queue, or broadcast broker in the docker environment, we need to make sure that the following environment variables are defined properly and they must be the same across all the pods.

• CACHE_PREFIX
• REDIS_PREFIX
• REDIS_CACHE_DB
• HORIZON_PREFIX

Hope this will help others trying to deploy the Laravel apps using Kubernetes and Docker.

Answer 3

In my case, I need to change my app environment from prod to production

APP_ENV=production

Answer 4

In my case I added the jobs into "emails" queue, but horizon.php config file didn't specify this queue name for supervisor-1:-)

Answer 5

I just restart Redis server

/etc/init.d/redis-server restart

Answer 6

If jobs or listeners send requests to external services and cannot reach destination hosts and the connection timeout value is set to something very big or job timeout value is also set to a big value then the jobs might also be in pending state long enough so that it may seem that horizon is not executing them.