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Asynchronous Task Processing

Introduction​

To provide a fast and responsive user experience, extensive processes are handled by background processes instead being directly executed on request.

Some examples for such background processes are:

  • Notifications (informing the users by e-mails or mobile push notifications)
  • Search index processing
  • File indexing

Workers / Job Processing​

Cronjob (Default)​

You can start workers using cron by executing the queue/run command. It works as long as the queues contain jobs.

CronTab Example:

* * * * * /usr/bin/php <INSERT HUMHUB PATH HERE>/yii queue/run

In this case the cron will start the command every minute and execute scheduled tasks.

Daemon​

You can start a worker deamon using following command:

cd protected
php yii queue/listen

Using Supervisor (recommended)

Supervisor is a process monitoring tool for Linux. It automatically starts, monitors and restarts your workers if they crash.

Example configuration (e.g. /etc/supervisor/conf.d/humhub.conf):

[program:humhub-workers]
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
command=/usr/bin/php <INSERT HUMHUB PATH HERE>/protected/yii queue/listen --verbose=1 --color=0
autostart=true
autorestart=true
user=www-data
numprocs=4
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=<INSERT HUMHUB PATH HERE>/protected/runtime/logs/yii-queue-worker.log

Replace the user www-data with the user of your http server if needed.

Using systemd

If systemd is installed on the system, a systemd timer could be an alternative to a cronjob.

This approach requires two files: humhub.service and humhub.timer. Create these two files in /etc/systemd/system/.

humhub.service should look like this:

[Unit]
Description=HumHub Queue Worker

[Service]
User=www-data
ExecStart=/usr/bin/php <INSERT HUMHUB PATH HERE>/protected/yii queue/listen --verbose=1 --color=0

[Install]
WantedBy=basic.target

Replace the user www-data with the user of your http server if needed.

humhub.timer should look like this:

[Unit]
Description=Run HumHub Queue Workers every minute

[Timer]
OnBootSec=1min
OnUnitActiveSec=1min
Unit=humhub.service

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

The important parts in the timer-unit are OnBootSec and OnUnitActiveSec. OnBootSec will start the timer 1 minute after boot, otherwise you would have to start it manually after every boot. OnUnitActiveSec will set a 1 minute timer after the service-unit was last activated.

Now all that is left is to start and enable the timer by running these commands:

systemctl start humhub.timer
systemctl enable humhub.timer

Queue Driver​

MySQL Database Driver (Default)​

If you don't have Redis or any other supported queuing software (RabbitMQ, Beanstalk or Gearman) running, this is the recommended driver. To enable this driver you need to add following block to your local configuration file (protected/config/common.php):

    // ...
    'components' => [
        // ...

        'queue' => [
            'class' => 'humhub\modules\queue\driver\MySQL',
        ],
        
        // ...
    ],
    // ...

Redis​

See Redis for further information.

Sync and Instant Queue​

The humhub\modules\queue\driver\Sync and humhub\modules\queue\driver\Instant queues are used in test and development environments without cron jobs.