Laravel Horizon, ext-pcntl and Windows

Update 2: You may want to use Docke for your local development. You could use these Tools: https://vessel.shippingdocker.com/ or https://laragon.org/

Update: As of version 1.0.1 laravel does require ext-posix via composer.json as well. I’ve updated the post to take care of this requirement.

As I start using Laravel’s newest package Horizon (Introduced by Taylor Otwell on Medium or at laracon.us) to control app’s queues, I was annoyed due to a windows related problem, pcntl (PHP’s process controlling module). And since version 1.0.1 the posix extension is required as well, which is also not available on windows.

After creating a new Laravel 5.5 project and adding horizon I got this error:

composer require laravel/horizon
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
Your requirements could not be resolved to an installable set of packages.

  Problem 1
    - laravel/horizon dev-master requires ext-pcntl * -> the requested PHP extension pcntl is missing from your system.
    - laravel/horizon dev-master requires ext-pcntl * -> the requested PHP extension pcntl is missing from your system.
    - Installation request for laravel/horizon dev-master -> satisfiable by laravel/horizon[dev-master].

  To enable extensions, verify that they are enabled in your .ini files:
    - C:\dev\tools\php\php.ini
  You can also run php --ini inside terminal to see which files are used by PHP in CLI mode.

By lookup the error I quickly learned, pcntl doesn’t like windows at all. Therefore I needed a workaround.

Ignore all platform requirements

The simplest way to install the dependencies anyway, is to ignore all platform related requirements using the option --ignore-platform-reqs (https://getcomposer.org/doc/03-cli.md#install)

But this is a bit hard, what happen if any another package needs a PHP module that is available for windows? Not a productive-like solution I think.

Ingore the module pctnl and posix

Composer supports using the option --ignore-platform-reqs and additionally specifiy which packages/modules to ignore. So you can run the following command for each install/update:

composer install --ignore-platform-reqs ext-pcntl ext-posix

But then, everyone using your app needs to know that just to run some queue admin panel. Not really proportionate.

Configure ignorance in composer.json

I finnaly came up with ignoring just the pcntl module at all directly in the composer.json file, since it’s not critical to run my app, only to run horizon.

{
    "config": {
        "platform": {
            "ext-pcntl": "7.1",
            "ext-posix": "7.1"
        }
    }
}

The version of ext-pcntl and ext-posix is similar to the version of php I’m using. In my tests the version  newer received any attention…

But notice: You are now responsible to install/enable pcntl on your prod server to be able to use it.