Laravel 11 Events Firing Multiple Times in Production (Nginx, Azure App Services, PHP 8.3)

I'm encountering an issue where Laravel events are firing multiple times, but only in the production environment.

Environment:

• Laravel: 11.x
• PHP: 8.3
• Web Server: Nginx
• Hosting: Azure App Services
• Setup:
  • One App Service runs the main Laravel application
  • A separate App Service handles scheduled tasks (cron)

We are dispatching Laravel events like this:

event(new ApplicationStatusChanged($application));

In production, these events trigger multiple times for a single operation. For example, a single POST request causes the event listener to run 2 times.

Check on direct GET request for Test and getting the same.

This does not happen in the local development environment.

We're trying to understand:

• Could this be due to Azure App Service architecture, deployment replication, or Nginx misconfiguration?
  • Why might synchronous Laravel events fire multiple times in a production setup like this?
• Are there known quirks or debugging tips for this kind of behavior in Laravel 11/PHP 8.3?

We've ruled out:

• Not using ShouldQueue on either the event or the listener — they are all synchronous.
• Listeners are not making changes that could retrigger the event.
• Confirmed it's not job retries or queue-related (we're not queuing).
• No duplicate requests are hitting the endpoint.
• Cache cleared completely (config, route, event, etc.).
• Stopped the cron App Service entirely — issue still persisted

After hours of debugging, I finally figured out the root cause of the issue where Laravel events were firing multiple times, but only on the server (production), not locally.

✅ Cause

Laravel automatically discovers and registers event listeners if they are placed in the App\Listeners directory and follow a certain structure.

Specifically, Laravel will auto-register any method named handle or __invoke in the listener, and bind it to the type-hinted event in its method signature.

In my case:

• The listener class had a __construct() method defined.

• Because of that, Laravel didn’t auto-discover the listener locally (as expected), but the server environment did, likely due to differences in how class discovery or optimization was handled in production.

• On top of that, I had also manually registered the listener in EventServiceProvider, thinking auto-discovery wasn’t happening.

So, in production, the listener was getting registered twice:

• Once via manual registration

• Once via auto-discovery

This caused the event to fire multiple times, but only on the server.

🔧 Solution

• I removed the unnecessary __construct() method from the listener, making it compatible with Laravel's auto-discovery mechanism.

• Then, I removed the manual listener registration from the EventServiceProvider.

After making these changes, both local and production environments behaved consistently, and the events were no longer fired multiple times.

📝 Takeaway

• Avoid adding constructors to listener classes unless absolutely necessary.

• Don’t register listeners manually if you’re placing them in the default App\Listeners directory and following Laravel conventions.

• Always check for duplicate listener registrations when you see events firing more than expected.