Gracefully Failing Cache Store

[noah1400]

Gracefully Failing Cache Store

Problem Statement

Imagine a scenario where a Laravel app uses the Redis cache driver. Currently, if Redis becomes unavailable (network issue, server down, etc.), all cache operations throw exceptions and crash the
application.

  // Current behavior - throws RedisException when Redis is down
  $value = Cache::store('redis')->get('user:123');  //  App crashes

  // Even Cache::remember() crashes before executing the callback
  $user = Cache::remember('user:123', 3600, function() {
      return User::find(123);  // This never runs if Redis is down
  });

This is problematic because:

• A non-critical service (cache) can take down your entire application
• Cache is meant to improve performance, not be a single point of failure
• You often want to compute the value fresh if cache is unavailable

Proposed Solution

Add a graceful_failure configuration option that allows cache stores to fail gracefully while still logging errors.

Configuration

  // config/cache.php
  'stores' => [
      'redis' => [
          'driver' => 'redis',
          'connection' => 'cache',
          'graceful_failure' => env('CACHE_GRACEFUL_FAILURE', false),
          'failure_behavior' => 'log', // 'log', 'report', or 'silent'
      ],
  ],

Behavior

When graceful_failure is enabled and Redis is unavailable:

  // Cache miss behavior - returns null instead of crashing
  $value = Cache::get('key');  // null (error logged)

  // Cache::remember executes callback
  $user = Cache::remember('user:123', 3600, function() {
      return User::find(123);  // Executes! Returns fresh data
  });

  // Write operations pretend to succeed
  Cache::put('key', 'value');  // true (error logged, but doesn't actually cache)

  // Has checks return false
  Cache::has('key');  // false (error logged)

I know that there are some bad use cases like:

• Session storage (failures could break auth)
• Rate limiting (cloud allow DOS attacks)
• Distributed locks (could cause race conditions)

what are you thoughts about something like that?

[macropay-solutions]

We always handle Cache as if it can throw and we call the callback. Cache not being documented that it can throw (analog for query builder) did not stop us to prepare for the worst.

[macropay-solutions]

Rate limiting (cloud allow DOS attacks)

Rate limiting is the server's job not PHP's job.