Bash One-Liner: Retry Laravel Failed Jobs, Filtered by Date

We all have those moments when Queue jobs fail. Sometimes it’s a bad deploy, others it’s an upstream service that’s taken a poop. Sometimes, we need to retry failed jobs, but can’t just artisan queue retry:all, because maybe we haven’t done a cleanup of failed jobs lately.

Oops…

worker@5986f48e91d6:/var/www/app# php artisan queue:failed | grep -v 2017-08-17
+------+------------+--------------------------------------------------+-------------------------+---------------------+
| ID   | Connection | Queue                                            | Class                   | Failed At           |
+------+------------+--------------------------------------------------+-------------------------+---------------------+
| 3094 | sqs        | https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123/my-queue | App\Jobs\MyImportantJob | 2017-08-17 21:14:07 |
...
| 851  | sqs        | https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123/my-queue | App\Jobs\MyImportantJob | 2017-08-17 03:35:08 |
| 850  | sqs        | https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123/my-queue | App\Jobs\MyImportantJob | 2017-07-28 11:35:08 |
| 849  | sqs        | https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123/my-queue | App\Jobs\MyImportantJob | 2017-07-28 11:27:09 |
| 848  | sqs        | https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123/my-queue | App\Jobs\MyImportantJob | 2017-07-28 11:26:37 |
| 847  | sqs        | https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123/my-queue | App\Jobs\MyImportantJob | 2017-07-28 11:20:38 |
...
| 262  | sqs        | https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123/my-queue | App\Jobs\MyImportantJob | 2017-03-21 10:33:19 |
+------+------------+--------------------------------------------------+-------------------------+---------------------+

In my case today, I was running some maintenance jobs overnight, when I overworked a legacy database and caused about ~2500 of 1m+ jobs to timeout. Not a big problem, but the jobs needed to be retried.

A colleague watching me do it, informed me that last time they did something like this (I sincerely hope it wasn’t 2500 failed jobs) they typed all the numbers in manually!

So, down to the point, the one-liner:

$ php artisan queue:retry $(php artisan queue:failed | grep 2017-08-17 | awk '{print $2}')

Let’s break that down

Basics

• $( ... )
  • Command substitution allows you to insert the results of the contents into your command
• |
  • The classic bash pipe sends the output of one command to the input of the next

The commands used

• php artisan queue:retry $( ... )
  • Run artisan queue:retry, we’ll end up giving it a list of IDs for the jobs to retry
• php artisan queue:failed
  • Get the listing of failed jobs
• grep 2017-08-17
  • Search for the date we want to filter by in each line
• awk '{print $2}'
  • awk will by default split on spaces, so print id which is in the second captured group (the | from the beginning of the table will be in the first position)

Other uses

Change the grep, and you can filter by a lot more than date.

• grep -v will inverse filter, so you can run everything except a given date
• grep <job name> - filter only specific classes
• grep <queue name> - filter specific queues, or connections