Laravel 5.5 - Horizon not running second queue automatically - php

Question

Using Laravel Horizon on Forge with Redis, I have a default queue and a notifications queue.
The notification jobs are all built up with a pause status under recent jobs and do NOT get processed. This is the code used:
$event->owner->notify((new ItemWasLiked($event))->onQueue('notifications'));
The only way I found to process them was to manually run the following command explicitly for notifications to process:
php artisan queue:work --queue=notifications
Shouldn't this be automatic as it comes in? What am I missing?

Answer 1

We need to instruct Horizon to start a queue worker that processes the notifications queue in addition to the default queue by adding an element to the queue worker configuration in config/horizon.php:
'environments' => [
...
'(environment name)' => [
'supervisor-1' => [
...
'queue' => [ 'default', 'notifications' ],
],
],
],
The 'queue' directive declares which queues a Horizon worker watches for jobs. The out-of-box configuration only specifies the default queue, so the worker will only process jobs pushed to that queue. The above is roughly equivalent to:
php artisan queue:work --queue=default,notifications
...where the first queue in the comma-separated list has the highest priority, and the last queue has the lowest priority. Horizon prioritizes queues by allocating a greater share of the number of processes rather than processing queues in order of priority.
Alternatively, we could add a second worker group to the configuration that processes the second queue:
'(environment name)' => [
'supervisor-1' => [
...
'queue' => [ 'default' ],
],
'supervisor-2' => [
...
'queue' => [ 'notifications' ],
],
],
...for which Horizon starts queue worker processes for each each of the two queues that run simultaneously.