What is Laravel Horizon?
Why Interviewers Ask This
Mid-level Laravel roles require deep understanding of this topic. Interviewers ask this to separate candidates who truly understand the mechanics from those who only know surface-level concepts.
Answer
Laravel Horizon provides a beautiful dashboard and code-driven configuration for Redis-powered queues. Install: composer require laravel/horizon. Access dashboard at /horizon. Horizon lets you configure queue workers, supervisor processes, and queue priorities in code (config/horizon.php) rather than server config files. The dashboard shows: real-time job throughput, failed jobs (with full stack traces), job retry, wait times, and process monitoring. Horizon uses a balanced load strategy — it automatically rebalances workers as queue load changes. Run: php artisan horizon. In production, use Supervisor to keep Horizon running. php artisan horizon:pause / horizon:continue to pause/resume processing. Only works with Redis queue driver.
Common Mistake
Candidates often give textbook answers here. Interviewers are more impressed when you relate the concept to a specific problem you solved in a real Laravel project.