Make Flaky APIs Reliable with Laravel’s retry() Helper

🚀 The Real-World Problem

External systems fail.

APIs timeout.

Network glitches happen.

Most developers write complex logic like this:

try {
    $response = Http::get($url);
} catch (\Exception $e) {
    sleep(1);
    $response = Http::get($url);
}

This quickly becomes ugly and hard to maintain.

Laravel gives you a cleaner solution.

🎯 The Laravel Way: retry()

$response = retry(3, fn () => Http::get($url));

That’s it.

Laravel will:

• try the operation
• retry it if it fails
• stop after 3 attempts

🧠 Real-World Example: Payment Gateway Call

$response = retry(5, function () {
    return Http::post('https://payment.api/charge', $data);
}, 200);

✔ Retries 5 times

✔ Waits 200ms between attempts

✔ Handles temporary network issues

🛒 Example: Database Lock Retry

$order = retry(3, function () {
    return Order::lockForUpdate()->first();
});

Perfect when database rows are temporarily locked.

🧩 Why Developers Love retry()

• No loops
• No try-catch nesting
• Clean and expressive
• Perfect for APIs, DB, queues
• Makes apps more resilient

Small helper, massive stability boost.