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Symfony 5: The Fast Track is the best book to learn modern Symfony development, from zero to production. +300 pages in full color showing how to combine Symfony with Docker, APIs, queues & async tasks, Webpack, Single-Page Applications, etc.

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Workers

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Workers

Workers (or consumers) are a great way to off-load processing in the background to make a website as snap as possible. Implementing workers in Symfony is made easy thanks to the Messenger component. This is why deploying workers is a first-class use-case with SymfonyCloud.

Basics

To deploy a worker, add an entry under the workers section:

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# .symfony.cloud.yaml
workers:
    mails:
        commands:
            start: |
                set -x -e

                (>&2 symfony-deploy)
                php bin/console messenger:consume --time-limit=60 --memory-limit=128M

On SymfonyCloud, worker containers run the exact same code as the web container. The container image is built only once, and then deployed multiple times in its own container along the web one. The build hook and dependencies may not vary but as these containers are independent they can be customized the same way using common properties (default values are the one defined for the main container):

  • relationships
  • size
  • disk
  • mount
  • variables
  • commands

The commands.start key is required and specifies the command to use to launch the application worker. It may be any valid shell command. If the command specified by the start key terminates it will be restarted automatically.

Tip

The deploy and post-deploy hooks are not run in worker containers. Therefore you need to replicate the part of it required for your application to be considered runnable. For usual Symfony application, it means running the (>&2 symfony-deploy) command before starting your worker.

Caution

Web and worker containers do not share mounts targets. Sharing files between those containers using the filesystem is not possible. Every data sharing needs to be done using services.

Accessing a worker container

As for the web container, developers have access to container logs and console using SSH. Using the Symfony CLI, one would use the --worker flag to target a specific worker. This flag uses the name of the worker, as defined by the key used in the workers section.

This flag is available for the following commands:

  • symfony env:cp
  • symfony env:logs
  • symfony env:sql
  • symfony env:ssh
  • symfony db:dump
  • symfony tunnel:open
  • symfony tunnel:close
  • symfony tunnel:info

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.