README

Cross-platform Laravel queue monitoring and worker management dashboard

Watchtower provides queue monitoring and worker management capabilities similar to Laravel Horizon, but with full cross-platform support including Windows. Unlike Horizon, which relies on PCNTL signals (Unix-only), Watchtower uses a polling-based approach for worker control that works on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Features

📊 Queue Monitoring Dashboard - Real-time job tracking, status monitoring, and metrics
⚙️ Worker Management - Start, stop, pause, resume workers from the web UI
🖥️ Cross-Platform - Works on Windows, Linux, and macOS
📋 Job Tracking - Job status, payload, exceptions, retries, worker info
🎨 Modern UI - Alpine.js dark-themed dashboard (no build step required)
🗑️ Automatic Cleanup - Time-based pruning of old job records

Requirements

PHP 8.2+
Laravel 11 or 12
Redis (for worker control commands)

Installation

composer require nathanphelps/watchtower

Publish the configuration and assets:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=watchtower-config
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=watchtower-migrations
php artisan migrate

Configuration

The package configuration is published to config/watchtower.php:

return [
    // Dashboard URL path
    'path' => env('WATCHTOWER_PATH', 'watchtower'),

    // Route middleware
    'middleware' => ['web'],

    // Authorization gate
    'gate' => env('WATCHTOWER_GATE', 'viewWatchtower'),

    // Job retention (days)
    'retention' => [
        'completed' => 7,
        'failed' => 30,
    ],

    // Supervisor configuration
    'supervisors' => [
        'default' => [
            'connection' => 'redis',
            'queue' => '*',           // Auto-discover all queues!
            // Or specify explicit queues:
            // 'queue' => ['default', 'emails', 'notifications'],
            'min_processes' => 1,
            'max_processes' => 10,
            'tries' => 3,
            'timeout' => 60,
        ],
    ],
];

Usage

Starting the Supervisor

Run the supervisor to automatically manage your queue workers:

php artisan watchtower:supervisor

The supervisor will:

Auto-discover all queues in your application (Redis keys, job records)
Maintain the minimum number of workers
Restart failed workers automatically
Monitor worker health via heartbeats

Tip: Set 'queue' => '*' in your config (default) to automatically detect and process all queues. Or specify explicit queues: 'queue' => ['default', 'emails', 'high']

Manual Worker Control

Start a single worker manually:

php artisan watchtower:worker default

Zero-Downtime Deployments

Gracefully restart all workers after deploying new code:

php artisan watchtower:restart

Options:

--queue=emails - Only restart workers on a specific queue
--force - Force immediate restart (don't wait for current job)

Workers will finish processing their current job, then restart with fresh code.

Terminating All Processes

Stop the supervisor and all workers (similar to horizon:terminate):

php artisan watchtower:terminate

Options:

--wait - Wait for all workers to finish before returning

Accessing the Dashboard

Visit /watchtower in your browser. By default, the dashboard is only accessible in local environments. Configure the gate in your AuthServiceProvider for production:

Gate::define('viewWatchtower', function ($user) {
    return in_array($user->email, [
        'admin@example.com',
    ]);
});

Pruning Old Jobs

Watchtower automatically prunes old job records. You can also run the prune command manually:

php artisan watchtower:prune

How It Works

Polling-Based Control

Unlike Horizon which uses PCNTL signals (Unix-only), Watchtower uses Redis for worker control:

Dashboard sends command to Redis: SET watchtower:worker:{id}:command "stop"
Worker checks Redis every 3 seconds
Worker reads and executes the command
Worker confirms status in database

This approach provides:

✅ Cross-platform compatibility
✅ No PCNTL dependency
✅ Simple debugging
⚠️ 1-3 second response delay (acceptable for worker management)

Dashboard Updates

The dashboard polls for updates every 3 seconds (configurable). This provides near-real-time visibility into:

Job counts and status
Worker health and activity
Throughput metrics

Artisan Commands

Command	Description
`watchtower:supervisor`	Start the supervisor to manage workers
`watchtower:worker {queue}`	Start a single worker process
`watchtower:prune`	Prune old job records

License

MIT License. See LICENSE.md for details.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Security

If you discover a security vulnerability, please send an email instead of using the issue tracker. See SECURITY.md for details.

Credits

Nathan Phelps
Claude Code - AI pair programming assistant
All Contributors

nathanphelps / watchtower

Maintainers

Details