PHP SDK

The official PHP SDK for SnerdMQ. Works with Laravel, Symfony, or vanilla PHP. No Redis, no Beanstalkd, no RabbitMQ.

Installation

composer require speed-nerd/snerdmq

The post-install hook automatically downloads the correct Rust daemon binary for your OS.

Quickstart

<?php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Snerdmq\SnerdQueue;

$queue = new SnerdQueue();

// Register a handler
$queue->registerHandler("send_email", function($data) {
    echo "Sending email to {$data['to']}...\n";
    // Throw an Exception to trigger retry
});

// Start listening
$queue->startListening();

// Enqueue a job
$queue->enqueue(
    "email-123",
    "send_email",
    ["to" => "user@example.com", "subject" => "Welcome!"],
    3,    // max retries
    0.5   // retry after hours
);

// Handle permanently failed tasks
$queue->registerMaxRetryHandler('send_email', function($data) {
    echo "Failed after all retries: " . json_encode($data) . "\n";
});

// Run the event loop (in a dedicated worker script)
$queue->listenLoop();

API Reference

new SnerdQueue(storagePath = null)

Creates a new queue instance and spawns the background daemon.

$queue->registerHandler($taskType, $callback)

Registers a closure handler for a task type.

$queue->enqueue(...)

Enqueues a new background job with positional arguments:

$queue->enqueue(
    "task-id",          // string: unique task ID
    "task_type",        // string: task type
    ["key" => "value"], // array: JSON-serializable payload
    3,                  // int: max retries
    0.5,                // float: retry after hours
    "api_group",        // string: rate limit group
    50,                 // int: max per minute
    true,               // bool: auto dedupe
    0.9,                // float: urgency score
    "2026-12-31T23:59:00Z", // string: execute at
    "0 8 * * *",        // string: cron expression
    "https://...",      // string: webhook URL
    300                 // int: max execution seconds
);

$queue->registerMaxRetryHandler($taskType, $callback)

Registers a closure handler for permanently failed tasks (Dead Letter Queue).

$queue->startDashboard($port)

Starts the built-in React dashboard via PHP's built-in web server.

$queue->yieldProgress($message)

Streams a progress update from within a handler.

Hard Timeouts

The PHP SDK uses pcntl_alarm for local timeout enforcement:

• Requires the pcntl extension
• Not supported on Windows (daemon still enforces timeouts at IPC level)
• Avoid using other pcntl_alarm calls within handlers

Dashboard

$queue = new SnerdQueue();
$queue->startDashboard(9090);
// Open http://localhost:9090

Queue Topology

Recommended: one queue, all job types (singleton). Each SDK client spawns its own Rust daemon and exclusively owns its storage directory (.snerdata by default). Register every job type on one client and serve a single shared dashboard:

$queue = new SnerdQueue();

// Two job types sharing the same queue, daemon, and dashboard
$queue->registerHandler("process_image", function($data) {
    echo "Processing image: {$data['image_id']}\n";
});

$queue->registerHandler("send_otp_email", function($data) {
    echo "Sending OTP to: {$data['to']}\n";
});

$queue->startDashboard(8080); // one dashboard shows every job type

All job types share the same job log, retry/DLQ pipeline, rate-limit state, and stats.

One queue per storage directory

The daemon takes an exclusive OS-level lock on its storage directory at startup. A second client on the same storage fails fast ("Another daemon is already running on storage ...") instead of double-executing jobs. This also applies across processes — multiple long-running PHP CLI workers each need their own $storage_path.

Need isolation between workloads? Give each queue its own storage directory — they become fully independent engines (own job log, rate limits, dashboard on its own port):

$images = new SnerdQueue(null, ".snerdata-images");
$emails = new SnerdQueue(null, ".snerdata-emails");

$images->startDashboard(8080);
$emails->startDashboard(8081);

Distributed Scaling

Scaling horizontally means one queue per server, each with its own storage — the load balancer routes requests, and every server processes the jobs it enqueued:

// Each server runs its own daemon on its own storage dir (local disk works fine)
$queue = new SnerdQueue(null, "/var/data/snerd");

A shared network drive (AWS EFS or NFS) is still a good home for that storage when a single instance needs durable state across container restarts.

Advanced Orchestration (v0.3.0 Features)

SnerdMQ v0.3.0 introduced powerful new primitives for managing complex background jobs. Below are realistic, production-like scenarios showing how to utilize these features in Php:

// 1. Sharded Queues
// Context: A developer needs to scale their deployment across 4 servers to handle massive load, but they don't want to use Redis.
// How to use: Tell the daemon how many shards to claim on boot. The queue handles the OS-level locking automatically.

$queue = new SnerdQueue(null, 4); // max_local_shards

// 2. Worker Pools
// Context: A system has both slow AI generation tasks and fast transactional emails. We want to prevent AI tasks from starving the email workers.

// Enqueue an AI task to a dedicated pool
$queue->enqueue(
    task_id: 'ai-gen-123', 
    task_type: 'ai_generation', 
    data: ['prompt' => 'A majestic horse'],
    pool: 'ai-pool'
);

// Enqueue an email task to a fast, urgent pool
$queue->enqueue(
    task_id: 'email-123', 
    task_type: 'send_email', 
    data: ['to' => 'user@example.com'],
    pool: 'urgent'
);

// 3. Job Chaining (DAGs)
// Context: A video processing pipeline where a video must be transcoded, then uploaded to S3, and finally an email notification must be sent.

// Step 1: Transcode
$queue->enqueue(task_id: 'transcode-1', task_type: 'transcode_video', data: ['file' => 'raw.mp4']);

// Step 2: Upload (Waits for Step 1)
$queue->enqueue(
    task_id: 'upload-1', 
    task_type: 'upload_s3', 
    data: ['file' => 'processed.mp4'],
    trigger_after_ids: ['transcode-1']
);

// Step 3: Notify (Waits for Step 2)
$queue->enqueue(
    task_id: 'notify-1', 
    task_type: 'send_email', 
    data: ['status' => 'done'],
    trigger_after_ids: ['upload-1']
);

// 4. Cron & Scheduled Jobs
// Context: A system needs to run a database cleanup script every night at midnight.

$queue->enqueue(
    task_id: 'daily-digest', 
    task_type: 'send_email', 
    data: ['template' => 'daily'], 
    cron: '0 8 * * *'
);

// 5. Hard Timeouts
// Context: A background worker is making an HTTP request to a flaky third-party API that might hang indefinitely. We forcefully kill it if it runs over 5 minutes.

$queue->enqueue(
    task_id: 'api-fetch-1', 
    task_type: 'fetch_data', 
    data: ['endpoint' => '/sync'], 
    max_execution_seconds: 300
);

// 6. Webhook Callbacks
// Context: A developer is using AWS Lambda or Vercel Serverless functions and wants SnerdMQ to trigger the function via an HTTP POST request rather than running a local worker.

$queue->enqueue(
    task_id: 'serverless-job', 
    task_type: 'resize_image', 
    data: ['img' => 'cat.jpg'], 
    webhook_url: 'https://api.example.com/webhook/snerdmq'
);

// 7. The Dead Letter Queue (DLQ)
// Context: A task has failed its maximum number of retries (e.g., the SendGrid API is down for hours). The developer needs to catch this to alert the team on Slack.

$queue->registerMaxRetryHandler('send_email', function($data) {
    echo "Task permanently failed! Alerting Slack with data: " . json_encode($data) . "
";
});

Architecture Best Practices

When building production applications with SnerdMQ, it is recommended to initialize the queue as a Singleton, isolate your domain workers into separate files/functions, use Dead Letter Queues (DLQ) for failed tasks via RegisterMaxRetryHandler, and ensure manual graceful shutdown. The embedded Dashboard UI can also be easily served from the same instance.

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use Snerd\SnerdQueue;

$queue = new SnerdQueue(['storage_path' => './.snerdata']);

$queue->registerHandler('send_email', function($data) {
    echo "Sending email to {$data['email']}...
";
});

$queue->registerMaxRetryHandler('send_email', function($data) {
    echo "Email to {$data['email']} failed permanently. Dead letter processing...
";
});

$queue->registerHandler('process_image', function($data) {
    echo "Processing image {$data['imageId']}...
";
});

$queue->startDashboard(8080);

// Graceful shutdown
if (function_exists('pcntl_signal')) {
    pcntl_async_signals(true);
    pcntl_signal(SIGINT, function() use ($queue) {
        $queue->shutdown();
        exit;
    });
    pcntl_signal(SIGTERM, function() use ($queue) {
        $queue->shutdown();
        exit;
    });
}

$queue->listenLoop();