Laravel Job Batching for Large Background Tasks

If you have ever needed to run a thousand related jobs and report progress to the user, you have probably reinvented this from scratch. Laravel's job batching feature, added a few versions back, gives you that pattern out of the box.

What batches solve

A batch is a group of jobs dispatched together with a shared identity. You can track how many have completed, cancel the whole batch, run a callback when it finishes, and run a different callback if any job inside it fails. All four are common needs that used to require a custom progress table and a custom dispatcher.

Setting one up

php$batch = Bus::batch([
    new ImportRow($row1),
    new ImportRow($row2),
    // ...
])->then(function (Batch $batch) {
    // all jobs done
})->catch(function (Batch $batch, Throwable $e) {
    // first failure
})->finally(function (Batch $batch) {
    // ran whether or not failures occurred
})->dispatch();

return ['batch_id' => $batch->id];

You can then load the batch by ID with Bus::findBatch($id) and check progress: $batch->totalJobs, $batch->processedJobs(), $batch->progress(). It is a lot of useful behavior for a small amount of code.

When not to use batches

Batches add a few rows to the job_batches table per dispatch and a progress check on every job completion. For a firehose of unrelated jobs (signups, emails, webhook deliveries), this overhead is wasted — those should be plain queued jobs.

Batches earn their keep when the user wants to know the status. CSV imports, bulk emails to a known list, and large recalculation jobs all benefit. If no one is ever going to ask "is it done yet," plain jobs are simpler and cheaper.