Clarification on Queue (Supervisor) Service Setup

Self-Hosted | v5
19

Over on this post, I was having issues with excessive logs being stored and was wondering what was going on. The problem was that in the Supervisor documentation from Laravel, they include an example command. They also leave in the text sqs in that example command, which I, not having a clue how Supervisor worked, thought needed to be there. Turns out, it doesn’t.

I really think the Invoice Ninja Supervisor documentation needs to be updated since clearly these people all made the same mistake.

Invoice Ninja’s documentation page has this:

If you have root access to your system, then simply follow the Laravel guide to configure the supervisor service to start and restart your queue.

You will then need to update the QUEUE_CONNECTION variable in the .env file as follows:

QUEUE_CONNECTION=database

While technically true, it’s very vague, and this left a lot of questions which I was able to get help with answering in this topic with the help of @david. I thought I’d share the bit from my own documentation on just the Supervisor setup. I hope it helps someone. Sorry about the random syntax highlighting in the commands, I have no idea what Discourse is doing.

Setting Up Supervisor for Invoice Ninja v5
Written for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

First, we need to install the Supervisor application:

$ sudo apt-get install supervisor

Next, create a configuration file for Invoice Ninja by navigating to the Supervisor configuration directory and starting up your text editor of choice with the file name to use. You can set any file name here ending in .conf. I’m using vi.

$ cd /etc/supervisor/conf.d
$ sudo vi invoiceninja-worker.conf

In the new invoiceninja-worker.conf file, enter the following:.

[program:invoiceninja-worker]
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
command=php /path/to/invoiceninja/artisan queue:work --sleep=3 --tries=3 --max-time=3600
autostart=true
autorestart=true
stopasgroup=true
killasgroup=true
user=www-data
numprocs=8
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/var/log/invoiceninja-worker.log
stopwaitsecs=3600

There’s 4 main things to change, shown in bold above:

  • program: The program name you’ll use for the worker
  • command: The path to the artisan file in the root of the Invoice Ninja application directory
  • user: The user that’ll be running Supervisor. Typically, this is the web server user (the same user that has ownership over the Invoice Ninja files)
  • stdout_logfile: Optionally, include the path to a log file for the Supervisor worker

Once these changes are made to suit your environment, save the file.

If you chose to set a log file path, ensure the log file is created and that the user account configured has access to it. For this example, the log is stored in /var/log.

$ cd /var/log
$ sudo touch invoiceninja-worker.log
$ sudo chown www-data:www-data invoiceninja-worker.log

Now that Supervisor is set up, we can read the configuration file:

$ sudo supervisorctl reread

This should tell us that the name of our config (invoiceninja-worker) is available. The above command will also need to be re-ran any time that the config file is updated.

Next, add the new config to the process group for Supervisor (this command also needs to be ran any time the configuration is updated)

$ sudo supervisorctl update

Now, start the Supervisor worker

$ sudo supervisorctl start invoiceninja-worker:*

Running the following will show worker processes as RUNNING (on my installation, I see 8 worker processes, numbered 00 through 07)

$ sudo supervisorctl status

Now that the Supervisor is configured, we need to tell Invoice Ninja to actually use it.

Edit the .env file for Invoice Ninja

$ sudo vi /path/to/invoiceninja/.env

Edit the following line to change it from sync to database, and save the file

QUEUE_CONNECTION=database

Finally, now that everything is set up, reload the config for Invoice Ninja and restart the queue. I’m using www-data for this example as the web server user.

$ cd /path/to/invoiceninja/
$ sudo -u www-data php artisan optimize
$ sudo -u www-data php artisan queue:restart

That’s it! You should now have a functioning Supervisor setup for Invoice Ninja.

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