On the Delicious Brains site they've posted a tutorial showing how to create a command line daemon that will emulate the Amazon Web Services SQSD handling. The SQSD is a worker daemon service that Amazon offers as a part of its Elastic Beanstalk support.

Sometimes when you’re building a project there are parts of the architecture that exist on production that don’t exist on your development machine. Those missing parts (like proprietary software that’s specific to your hosting provider) can sometimes mean unwelcome surprises when you deploy to production.

Recently as part of my work on Mergebot, I decided to address this. My local machine was missing the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Worker Environment SQS daemon (known as SQSD). AWS isn’t open source so there’s, unfortunately, no official way to replicate it. So I decided to build a small PHP command line (CLI) app to attempt to replicate its functionality. In this article, I’m going to cover some of the aspects of creating a command line app in PHP and explain how I implemented them for my replica SQSD CLI.

He starts off with a brief overview of the Laravel queue worker and how it compares to the SQSD functionality. He then starts in on the code to create the daemon (outside of a framework) and adding in the while loop to keep it running as a daemon making use of the SQSD Worker class as a base. The post ends with some instructions on packaging up the command line tool using the phar functionality already included in the PHP language.