Automatically Discard Orphaned Queue Jobs with deleteWhenMissingModels

Use the $deleteWhenMissingModels property on queued jobs to silently discard jobs if their referenced database records were deleted before execution.

When an Eloquent model is passed to a queued job and a user deletes that record before the worker picks up the job, Laravel throws a ModelNotFoundException, causing the job to fail and populate the failed_jobs table.

Setting $deleteWhenMissingModels = true instructs the worker to delete the job silently.

Enabling on Job Classes

namespace App\Jobs;

use App\Models\Post;
use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
use Illuminate\Queue\InteractsWithQueue;
use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;

class GeneratePostThumbnailJob implements ShouldQueue
{
    use InteractsWithQueue, Queueable, SerializesModels;

    // Silently delete job if the Post model was deleted from database
    public bool $deleteWhenMissingModels = true;

    public function __construct(public Post $post) {}

    public function handle(): void
    {
        // Process thumbnail
    }
}

Summary

• Prevents false-alarm errors in failed_jobs and error tracking tools (Sentry, Bugsnag).
• Silently purges queued tasks when parent models are deleted.
• Standard property provided by the SerializesModels trait.