Slightly confused about what Artisan::callSilent does

Question

I have a web route in my laravel project, and in that web route currently I'm calling an Artisan command I have defined in app/Console/Commands. I'm doing Artisan::call(command).

So, it's my understanding first of all that when I call it like that, my web request will wait for that to complete before it continues into the next bit of code, is that right? Does it wait for Artisan::call to complete?

I would like a solution that doesn't wait, and I have one potential workaround, but before I use my workaround, I want to make sure Artisan::callSilent() doesn't do what I want it to do. If I use callSilent instead, will that run the artisan command in the backround without blocking the rest of the web request process?

Answer 1

The CallsCommand.php shows the following functions:

   /**
     * Call another console command.
     *
     * @param  \Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command|string  $command
     * @param  array  $arguments
     * @return int
     */
    public function call($command, array $arguments = [])
    {
        return $this->runCommand($command, $arguments, $this->output);
    }

    /**
     * Call another console command without output.
     *
     * @param  \Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command|string  $command
     * @param  array  $arguments
     * @return int
     */
    public function callSilent($command, array $arguments = [])
    {
        return $this->runCommand($command, $arguments, new NullOutput);
    }

So as the comments say, callSilent does the same thing as the call command, but doesn't send any output. There's also a callSilently(), which just calls callSilent, so it's basically an alias.

Answer 2

Okay, so for the record

Artisan::call() is blocking, and Artisan::callSilent() ... well, it doesn't even exist on my installed version of laravel, on the server I'm working on, so I have no idea.

I'm using a workaround like this:

    $command = "php artisan " . $command ." > /dev/null 2>/dev/null &";
    shell_exec($command);