bugged.cc - Things broke. We wrote it down.

What happened?

I had a Laravel application where queued emails appeared to be dispatched successfully, but users never received them.

The application was running normally, and the jobs were being added to the queue without any visible errors. The confusing part was that everything worked when I used

QUEUE_CONNECTION=sync.

After switching to Redis for production, the emails stopped arriving.

Environment

Laravel 11,PHP 8.3,Redis 7,Supervisor 4

Error Message

There was no visible error in the Laravel application. The jobs simply remained in the Redis queue.

What was actually wrong?

The Laravel queue worker was not running on the production server.

The application was correctly pushing jobs into Redis, but nothing was processing them.

The Fix

I started the Laravel queue worker and configured Supervisor to keep it running:

php artisan queue:work redis

Then I added the worker to Supervisor so it would automatically restart if the process stopped.

After restarting Supervisor, the queued emails were processed normally.

What I Learned

A successful job dispatch does not mean the job was actually processed.

When using Redis, RabbitMQ, or another queue driver in production, always verify that the queue worker is running and being supervised.

Laravel Queue Jobs Were Running Successfully but Emails Were Never Sent