Add an option to enable/disable defer in the env

[Mubeen142]

The defer function is great and works perfectly fine for most people. However for some people defer does not work due to their webserver/php manager.

It would be great if we could turn off defer using an ENV variable.

So for users that aren't using a modern php manager, they can have the task executed in the request rather than in the background

Something like

APP_DEFER_BACKGROUND=false

and then inside the defer() helper method

// inside the defer() helper method
if(! config('app.defer_background', true)) {
   // execute the callable right away
}

// pass the callable to be executed in the background

This simple addition would allow users that can't use the defer() method to turn it off without having to rewrite the entire application.

[henzeb]

Defer is just a fancy way of registering callbacks that are called upon termination inside a terminate method of a middleware.

https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/middleware#terminable-middleware

The solution you are proposing may have side effects. right away means you can't cancel if something later on fails. which might be expected.

Also, I am wondering what particular setup you have that this won't work. Because terminable middleware have existed for a while now, and it works PHP 8.2 which is the minimum required version.

[Mubeen142]

As mentioned in the Laravel docs, defer will only work with modern webservers

and your web server is using FastCGI

Executing right away shouldn't cause any problems, since the code that is executed after defer is not dependent on each other.

[henzeb]

Not necessarily. You can cancel (forget) deffered callbacks. If the code relies on that, switching of defer could cause side effect. Imagine you defer sending an email, but an exception on a second part causes everything to rollback, when deffered, it cancels the email, this new switch caused the email to be sent. In other words: in your situation it won't be canceled on exceptions, while it does in current situation.

Since this is basically terminable Middleware, we can only assume the problem also exists there as well. I think we should solve your problem there.