On the Laravel News site today there's a tutorial posted showing you how to combine Docker and Laravel's Scheduler/Queue and make them still run as they would on a virtual server.

In Laravel, one of the tricky changes when switching from a virtual server to Docker is figuring out how to run a scheduler and a queue worker. I see this question come up quite a bit when PHP developers are trying to figure out how to use Laravel with Docker.

Should you run them on the host server? Should you run via cron in a Docker container?

There are a couple of ways I recommend running the scheduler command and Laravel queues in Docker, and we’re going to cover the basics of running both with a complete (albeit simple) Docker setup you can use to experiment.

Their approach uses a single multi-purpose Docker image rather than splitting the functionality up and making it more complex (Laravel subscribes to the monolithic approach anyway). The post then gets into the setup of this environment using Docker and docker-compose to configure several services: application (app), a Redis container and a MySQL container. The contents of the docker-compose and Dockerfile configurations are included as well as the VirtualHost configuration for the main site. Next it shows the use of the CMD directive to run a bash script when the build is brought up. This is what kicks off the scheduler/queue handling. The post finishes up with a few other changes needed to the Docker configuration and the creation of the "scheduler" service.