Cloud Tasks Queue Driver for Laravel

A Laravel queue driver for Google Cloud Tasks, enabling serverless job processing for applications running on Google App Engine or Google Cloud Run.

Compatible with both Firevel and standard Laravel applications.

Requirements

• PHP 8.0+ (tested on 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4)
• Laravel 8.x – 12.x (tested against 11.x and 12.x)
• Google Cloud Project with Cloud Tasks API enabled

Installation

composer require firevel/cloud-tasks-queue-driver

The package auto-discovers and registers itself via Laravel's package discovery.

Configuration

Add the connection to your config/queue.php:

'connections' => [
    'cloudtasks' => [
        'driver' => 'cloudtasks',
        'project' => env('GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT'),
        'location' => env('CLOUD_TASKS_LOCATION', 'us-central1'),
        'queue_name' => env('CLOUD_TASKS_QUEUE', 'default'),
        'route' => env('CLOUD_TASKS_ROUTE', '/_cloudtasks'),
        // App Engine specific (optional)
        'service' => env('GAE_SERVICE'),
        'version' => env('GAE_VERSION'),
        // Cloud Run specific (optional)
        'url' => env('CLOUD_TASKS_URL'),
    ],
],

Set your default queue connection in .env:

Note: The location must match your App Engine or Cloud Run region.

Configuration Options

| Option | Description | |--------|-------------| | project | Google Cloud project ID | | location | Cloud Tasks queue location (must match your compute region) | | queue_name | Default queue name | | route | HTTP endpoint path for task callbacks | | service | App Engine service name (falls back to the GAE_SERVICE env variable when not set) | | version | App Engine version to route tasks to (when not set, tasks go to the service's default version) | | url | Custom URL for Cloud Run or when behind a proxy/load balancer |

Cloud Tasks Setup

Create a queue using gcloud:

gcloud tasks queues create default

Or via queue.yaml:

queue:
name: default
  rate: 500/s

See the Cloud Tasks documentation for advanced queue configuration.

Usage

Use Laravel's standard queue API:

// Dispatch a job
dispatch(new ProcessOrder($order));

// Dispatch with delay
dispatch(new ProcessOrder($order))->delay(now()->addMinutes(5));

// Dispatch to a specific queue
dispatch(new ProcessOrder($order))->onQueue('orders');

Note: Queue names map directly to Cloud Tasks queues, so onQueue('orders') requires a Cloud Tasks queue named orders to exist.

How It Works

Unlike traditional queue drivers, there is no queue:work process. Cloud Tasks delivers each job back to your application over HTTP:

1. Dispatching a job creates a Cloud Task with the serialized job as its payload, signed with an HMAC-SHA256 signature derived from your APP_KEY.
2. Cloud Tasks sends the payload via HTTP POST to the handler route (/_cloudtasks by default), which the package registers automatically.
3. The handler verifies the signature, rejects unauthenticated requests with a 403, and processes valid jobs through Laravel's queue worker.

Note: Since job payloads are signed with APP_KEY, rotating the key will invalidate tasks that were queued before the rotation.

Retries, Attempts and Overlapping

• Retries are managed by the Cloud Tasks queue configuration (maxAttempts, backoff, etc.). A failed job returns a 500 response and Cloud Tasks redelivers it according to the queue's retry policy.
• Per-job attempts are supported: when a job defines $tries, it is marked as failed once the limit is reached and the handler responds with a 200 so Cloud Tasks stops redelivering it. $job->attempts() is 1-based (1 on the first attempt), derived from the X-CloudTasks-TaskRetryCount / X-AppEngine-TaskRetryCount headers.
• Releasing ($this->release($delay)) creates a fresh Cloud Task with the same payload, since Cloud Tasks has no native release. The attempt count is carried over in the payload. This also makes the WithoutOverlapping job middleware work as expected — overlapping jobs are pushed back instead of lost. It requires a cache store that supports atomic locks.
• Unique jobs (ShouldBeUnique) work out of the box; the unique lock is handled by Laravel at dispatch time and also requires a lock-capable cache store.
• To process an entire queue serially (one task at a time), set maxConcurrentDispatches=1 on the Cloud Tasks queue — no application code needed.

Routing Behavior

• App Engine: Tasks are routed to the specific service and version that dispatched them, ensuring version consistency during deployments.
• Cloud Run: Tasks are routed to the currently promoted revision.

Testing

The test suite uses Orchestra Testbench and runs without any Google Cloud credentials (the Cloud Tasks client is mocked).

composer install
composer test

Tests run automatically via GitHub Actions on PHP 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 for every push and pull request.

License

MIT