Several of my recent projects are Laravel apps that use Horizon to manage the queue and run jobs.

However, I frequently forgot to run php artisan horizon when opening the project, and sometimes spent a bit of time trying to figure out why a job hadn’t run before remembering. 🤦

In addition—and this is a relatively minor annoyance—even when I do remember to start Horizon, sometimes I’d like to see the metrics dashboard showing how many jobs have run in the past few minutes.

Edit: I added npm run watch to help with Tailwind JIT mode.

Workspace Tasks

Enter VS Code’s Tasks feature. This can automatically start running tasks when a workspace is opened.

To get set up:

1. Open the command palette (command-shift-P) and activate “Tasks: Manage Automatic Tasks in Folder”
2. Activate “Allow Automatic Tasks in Folder”
3. Open the command palette again and activate “Tasks: Open Workspace Tasks”
4. Add the following to the workspace:

Now every time I open the workspace, assets are rebuilt as I modify them and Horizon and the scheduler run automatically.