Package to use Laravel on AWS Lambda with Bref.

This package provides the following benefits:

• it configures Laravel for AWS Lambda (for websites, APIs or workers)
• it provides a bridge to run Laravel Queues worker on AWS Lambda

You can read the Bref documentation for Laravel for more documentation.

In any case, it is recommended to first learn about serverless, AWS Lambda and Bref before using this package.

Installation

composer require bref/laravel-bridge --update-with-dependencies

The Bref\LaravelBridge\BrefServiceProvider service provider will be registered automatically.

You can now create a default serverless.yml at the root of your project by running:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=serverless-config

The application is now ready to be deployed:

serverless deploy

Usage

Read the official Laravel Bridge documentation on bref.sh.

Laravel Queues with SQS

This package lets you process jobs from SQS queues on AWS Lambda by integrating with Laravel Queues and its job system. A deployable example is available in the bref/examples repository.

For example, given a ProcessPodcast job:

<?php declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Jobs;

use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Bus\Dispatchable;
use Illuminate\Queue\InteractsWithQueue;
use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;

class ProcessPodcast implements ShouldQueue
{
    use Dispatchable, InteractsWithQueue, Queueable, SerializesModels;

    /** @var int */
    private $podcastId;

    public function __construct(int $podcastId)
    {
        $this->podcastId = $podcastId;
    }

    public function handle(): void
    {
        // process the job
    }
}

We can dispatch this job to SQS just like any Laravel job:

ProcessPodcast::dispatch($podcastId);

The job will be pushed to SQS. Now, instead of running the php artisan queue:work command, SQS will directly trigger our handler on AWS Lambda to process our job immediately.

Setup

SQS

To create the SQS queue (and the permissions for your Lambda to read/write to it), you can either do that manually, or use serverless.yml.

To make things simpler, we will use the Serverless Lift plugin to create and configure the SQS queue.

1. Install Lift

   serverless plugin install -n serverless-lift

2. Use the Queue construct in serverless.yml:

provider:
    ...
    environment:
        APP_ENV: production
        QUEUE_CONNECTION: sqs
        SQS_QUEUE: ${construct:jobs.queueUrl}

functions:
    ...

constructs:
    jobs:
        type: queue
        worker:
            handler: worker.php
            layers:
                - ${bref:layer.php-74}

We define Laravel environment variables in provider.environment (this could also be done in the deployed .env file):

• QUEUE_CONNECTION: sqs enables the SQS queue connection
• SQS_QUEUE: ${construct:jobs.queueUrl} passes the URL of the created SQS queue

If you want to create the SQS queue manually, you will need to set these variables.

Watch out: in the example above, we set the full SQS queue URL in the SQS_QUEUE variable. If you set only the queue name (which is also valid), you will need to set the SQS_PREFIX environment variable too.

Note that on AWS Lambda, you do not need to create AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY variables: these access keys are created automatically by Lambda and available through those variables. There is, however, one thing missing: the AWS_SESSION_TOKEN variable is not taken into account by Laravel by default (comment on this issue if you want this fixed). In the meantime, edit config/queue.php to add this line:

        'sqs' => [
            'driver' => 'sqs',
            'key' => env('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'),
            'secret' => env('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'),
+           'token' => env('AWS_SESSION_TOKEN'),
            'prefix' => env('SQS_PREFIX', 'https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/your-account-id'),

Finally, create the worker.php file. This is the file that will handle SQS events in AWS Lambda:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=serverless-worker

That's it! Anytime a job is pushed to the SQS queue, SQS will invoke worker.php on AWS Lambda and our job will be executed.

Differences and limitations

The SQS + Lambda integration already has a retry mechanism (with a "dead letter queue" that stores failed messages). This is why those mechanisms from Laravel are not used at all.

The Lift "queue" construct automatically configures failed messages to be retried 3 times. Read the Lift Queue documentation for more details and options.

Note: for those familiar with Lambda, you may know that batch processing implies that any failed job will mark all the other jobs of the batch as "failed". However, Laravel manually marks successful jobs as "completed" (i.e. those are properly deleted from SQS).

Failed messages

Lift provides CLI commands to list and manage failed messages. For example:

# List failed messages
serverless jobs:failed

# Purge failed messages
serverless jobs:failed:purge

# Retry failed messages
serverless jobs:failed:retry

Read more about Lift Queue commands.