pg-boss

Queueing jobs in Node.js using PostgreSQL like a boss.

async function readme() {
  const PgBoss = require('pg-boss');
  const boss = new PgBoss('postgres://user:pass@host/database');

  boss.on('error', error => console.error(error));

  await boss.start();

  const queue = 'some-queue';

  let jobId = await boss.send(queue, { param1: 'foo' })

  console.log(`created job in queue ${queue}: ${jobId}`);

  await boss.work(queue, someAsyncJobHandler);
}

async function someAsyncJobHandler(job) {
  console.log(`job ${job.id} received with data:`);
  console.log(JSON.stringify(job.data));

  await doSomethingAsyncWithThis(job.data);
}

pg-boss is a job queue built in Node.js on top of PostgreSQL in order to provide background processing and reliable asynchronous execution to Node.js applications.

pg-boss relies on SKIP LOCKED, a feature added to postgres specifically for message queues, in order to resolve record locking challenges inherent with relational databases. This brings the safety of guaranteed atomic commits of a relational database to your asynchronous job processing.

This will likely cater the most to teams already familiar with the simplicity of relational database semantics and operations (SQL, querying, and backups). It will be especially useful to those already relying on PostgreSQL that want to limit how many systems are required to monitor and support in their architecture.

Features

• Exactly-once job delivery
• Backpressure-compatible polling workers
• Cron scheduling
• Pub/sub API for fan-out queue relationships
• Deferral, retries (with exponential backoff), rate limiting, debouncing
• Completion jobs for orchestrations/sagas
• Direct table access for bulk loads via COPY or INSERT
• Multi-master compatible (for example, in a Kubernetes ReplicaSet)
• Automatic creation and migration of storage tables
• Automatic maintenance operations to manage table growth

Requirements

• Node 16 or higher
• PostgreSQL 11 or higher

Installation

# npm
npm install pg-boss

# yarn
yarn add pg-boss

Documentation

• Docs

Contributing

To setup a development environment for this library:

git clone https://github.com/timgit/pg-boss.git
npm install

To run the test suite you will need to pgboss access to an empty postgres database. You can set one up using the following commands on a local postgres instance:

CREATE DATABASE pgboss;
CREATE user postgres WITH PASSWORD 'postgres';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE pgboss to postgres;
-- run the following command in the context of the pgboss database
CREATE EXTENSION pgcrypto;

If you use a different database name, username or password, or want to run the test suite against a database that is running on a remote machine then you will need to edit the test/config.json file with the appropriate connection values.

You can then run the linter and test suite using

npm test