Laravel Forge

On Forge, the autoscaler is just another Daemon. It runs like any other Laravel long-running process.

1. Add the Daemon

In your Forge site: Daemons → Add New Daemon

Click Create. Forge starts it immediately.

2. Remove any competing Queue Workers

Forge has a separate Queue Workers section. Delete any entry whose queues the autoscaler will manage. Two worker supervisors on one queue will fight:

• The autoscaler spawns queue:work --queue=payments
• Forge's queue worker UI also spawns queue:work --queue=payments
• Both claim the same jobs; unpredictable behaviour follows

You can keep Forge queue workers for queues you list in queue-autoscale.excluded. That's exactly what the excluded config is for — see Queue Topology.

3. Deploys

Add this after the new release is active and migrations/config-cache steps are done:

php artisan queue:autoscale:restart

The command works like Laravel's queue:restart: it writes a cache signal, the running autoscale manager notices it on the next evaluation tick, gracefully stops spawned workers, and exits. Forge's Daemon supervisor then relaunches php artisan queue:autoscale from the current release.

For a manual graceful restart, run:

php artisan queue:autoscale:restart

If the manager is wedged and does not exit, use Forge's Daemons → Restart button or sudo supervisorctl restart daemon-<daemon-id> as an operational fallback.

4. Verify

Forge → Daemons shows the process status. Inspect logs via Forge's log viewer, or SSH:

tail -f /home/forge/.forge/daemon-<id>.log

You should see Autoscale manager started shortly after deploy, then periodic worker-spawn/terminate activity once jobs arrive.

Gotchas

• .env changes don't propagate without a Daemon restart. Forge does this automatically after "Update Secrets" in the UI.
• PHP version mismatch. Forge servers usually run multiple PHP versions. Make sure the Daemon command uses the same php binary your web layer uses (php8.3 or similar if you pin a specific version).
• Long-running manager holds old code until restart. A fresh deploy that changes scaling thresholds won't take effect until the Daemon restarts. Keep php artisan queue:autoscale:restart in the deploy script.