Laravel's chunk method for deleting records

#php#open-source

I’ve been meaning to clean up some old tickets using a console command in a Laravel project. I used Warp to generate the code, and it naturally suggested using chunk, which made complete sense at the time.

The code looked perfectly fine. But what do you know, it actually only deleted about half the records whenever we ran it.

Anatomy of the Problem

  • The first run starts off with, say, 120,000 tickets, and it deletes 60,000 of them.
  • In the next run, it deletes 30,000, and so on.
  • The issue is that chunk uses an offset under the hood. When you delete records, the total count decreases, and the offset for the next chunk ends up skipping records you intended to process.

It turns out there’s a better way. Using chunkById or simply doing a direct bulk delete query without chunking often avoids this shifting offset trap. That’s a wrap.