Jobs

Quick Introduction

Jobs is a single PHP idea you'll use in almost every backend project.

In this lesson you learn only jobs — not five topics at once. By the end you can write a small working example and explain it in an interview.

We connect each lesson to our course projects: Login System, Blog CMS, REST API, Inventory, Employee Management, and E-Commerce Backend.

Business Problem

You're building the Blog CMS. After a user signs in, you need jobs working correctly before storing data or showing a dashboard.

Without understanding Jobs, the team ships bugs: wrong totals, broken sessions, or type errors that only appear in production. This lesson fixes that with one clear pattern you can copy into your project today.

Core Concept

• Jobs is one focused idea — learn it before mixing with other PHP topics.
• Use it in PHP 8.3+ with declare(strict_types=1); at the top of every file.
• Our course project (Blog CMS) uses jobs in real handlers.
• Run small scripts with php file.php after each change — don't just read.
• Interviewers ask for a one-minute explanation plus a tiny code sample.

Syntax

Core syntax for Jobs. Every keyword below appears in production PHP — Laravel and Symfony use the same primitives under the hood.

declare(strict_types=1);

Keywords: declare · strict_types · namespace

Step-by-Step Example

Run this script locally. Change one value, run again, and watch what changes.

<?php
declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Jobs;

use Illuminate\Bus\Batchable;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Bus\Dispatchable;

final class SyncCatalogItem implements ShouldQueue
{
    use Batchable, Dispatchable;

    public int $tries = 3;
    public array $backoff = [10, 60, 300];

    public function __construct(public readonly string $sku) {}

    public function handle(): void
    {
        if ($this->batch()?->cancelled()) return;
        // Push SKU to external ERP
    }
}

Line by line

1. — part of the jobs example; run the file to see the result.
2. declare(strict_types=1); — turns on strict type checking for this file.
3. namespace App\Jobs; — part of the jobs example; run the file to see the result.
4. use Illuminate\Bus\Batchable; — part of the jobs example; run the file to see the result.
5. use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue; — part of the jobs example; run the file to see the result.

Authenticated

Real-World Example

In the Blog CMS, jobs appears in a single request handler — not spread across ten files. Keep the example small, test it with php, then paste the pattern into your project branch.

<?php
declare(strict_types=1);

// TODO: Jobs exercise for Blog CMS