Queue not processing

Symptom: jobs stay pending; PDFs missing; mail “sent” but empty inbox; webhooks never leave.

Likely cause: no worker; failed jobs; QUEUE_CONNECTION mismatch.

CMS CRUD can look healthy while PDFs, webhooks, and mail sit in the jobs table. Horizon is not in this product.

Check

1. Production default is QUEUE_CONNECTION=database. Redis is optional. sync runs jobs inside the HTTP request — not for production.
2. Is anything consuming jobs? cPanel: cron drain queue:work --stop-when-empty. VPS: persistent php artisan queue:work. From backend/: php artisan queue:work --once.
3. SQL: growing jobs count means nobody is working.
4. Platform Admin → Queues (/admin/queues) — title Failed jobs. Or php artisan queue:failed.

Fix

• Start queue:work or the cron drain. After deploy: php artisan queue:restart.
• Retry failed jobs. The scheduler prunes failures weekly (queue:prune-failed --hours=168).
• If SSH queue:work works but cron does not: cron PHP is not 8.4 or the path is wrong.
• After reboot, jobs pile up → crontab or systemd unit was not enabled.

Cron alone does not generate invoice PDFs. Worker + cron are different.

Related: Queue, Cron, PDF.