It's okay to use Laravel's Database Queue Driver in Production

For years, I've relied on the Database Queue Driver for small and mid-sized Laravel applications, despite a persistent whisper in my ear warning me, "Taylor Otwell himself says it was not intended for production."

This cautionary statement has made its way around the community and has continued to pop up in Reddit threads and Twitter conversations over the past few years. And I had memorized it too.

So I was a bit surprised when Taylor casually mentioned in one of the recent Laravel Podcast episodes that queues in the database "have become more and more robust, so you can actually use the database driver for queues in production."

It turns out that this is not actually news from 2024, but has not been as much of a problem for several years as it was in 2016. Mohammad Said, a former Laravel employee and an expert on the queuing system for Laravel, already addressed this in 2021

I didn't know anything about this. Obviously I didn't recheck what I had remembered. And so I still had a bad feeling when I relied on the database driver in production scenarios.

Just because something works "out of the box" and is considered production-ready does not, of course, mean that it is always the optimal choice. For many applications, a robust solution like Redis might be better suited. However, the realization that the database driver is a viable option is a significant revelation.

So, this isn't groundbreaking news, but maybe I'm not the only one who missed this information or you still have this false impression. For my part, I am glad that I can now use the database driver for queues for smaller applications without any stomach ache.