Workers

Workers are long-lived background processes that run alongside your application — queue consumers, schedulers, metric samplers, and similar. Each worker runs in its own container that shares the application image but runs a custom command instead of serving HTTP traffic.

<workers>

The optional <workers> element contains one or more <worker> definitions.

<workers>
    <worker name="queue" command="php artisan queue:work"/>
    <worker name="scheduler" command="php bin/console messenger:consume async"/>
</workers>

<worker>

Attribute	Required	Default	Description
name	Yes	—	Unique worker name within the application. Used to derive the container name.
command	Yes	—	The long-running command the container executes, run from /app.

Name pattern

name must match [a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9 _-]* and be unique among the application's workers.

Resulting Docker Compose effect

For an application slug app, a worker named queue becomes a container named {appSlug}-worker-{slug} — here app-worker-queue. The worker:

• reuses the application image (build/image), environment variables, mounts, and depends_on from the app service;
• runs your command instead of the web server;
• uses restart: unless-stopped so it comes back after crashes;
• has its healthcheck disabled (it is not an HTTP service).

<application name="app" type="php:8.5" root="/">
    <web>
        <location path="/" root="public" index="index.php" passthru="/index.php"/>
    </web>
    <workers>
        <worker name="queue" command="php artisan queue:work"/>
    </workers>
    <relationships>
        <relationship name="database" target="db"/>
    </relationships>
</application>

Workers vs. cron jobs

A worker is a process that stays running continuously (it loops and consumes work as it arrives). A cron job runs a command on a schedule and exits. Choose a worker for queue consumers and daemons; choose a cron for periodic one-shot commands like nightly cleanup.

Related

• Workers (app guide) — managing and observing workers in the UI
• Crons — scheduled commands
• Relationships — wiring workers to services
• Examples