How to manage background jobs for a web backend?

I have 2 Ubuntu boxes. One contains a simple mono (C#) executable that can do some time consuming job (arguments are passed through command-line). The other has a web control panel (PHP, laravel).

I want users to be able to launch tasks through the web front end, monitor their progress, and be able to see the results and logs. It's a hobby project so I don't have much time to develop it and I don't expect lots of users. What approach it better to use for this task?

I'm thinking about using a message queue and writing stand alone daemon that will take and execute jobs from the queue. But I didn't use message queues before and I'm not sure if it's able to lock a task while it's executing and attach progress data to it. Or maybe just use a database instead of message queue?