OffBroadway.Redis

An opinionated Redis connector for Broadway to process work from a Redis list structure.

Documentation can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/off_broadway_redis.

This project provides:

• OffBroadway.Redis.Producer - A GenStage producer that continuously pops items from a Redis list and acknowledges them after being successfully processed.
• OffBroadway.Redis.RedisClient - A generic behaviour to implement Redis clients.
• OffBroadway.Redis.RedixClient - Default Redis client used by OffBroadway.Redis.Producer.

What is opinionated about this library?

Because Redis lists do not support the concept of acknowledgements, this project utilizes the RPOPLPUSH command available in Redis to atomically pop an item from the list while moving the item to a 'working' or 'processing' list for a later pseudo-acknowledgement using the LREM command.

This idea follows the blueprint of the Reliable Queue pattern outlined in the Redis documentation found here.

Because RPOPLPUSH is used, the other assumption is that the head of your list will be on the right side, so you will likely want to push work into your list using LPUSH (for FIFO processing). If you want to prioritize an item to be processed next, you could push that to the right (head) by using a RPUSH.

Redis Client

The default Redis client uses the Redix library. See that project for other features.

I have not attempted to use any other Redis libraries in the community at this point. I expect there may need to be changes made to this producer to accomodate others.

Caveats

• You are responsible for maintaining your own named connection to Redis outside the scope of this library. See the Real-World Usage docs for Redix for setting up a named instance/connection.
• At this point, no testing has been done with a pooling strategy around Redis. I am using a single connection dedicated for my broadway pipeline in a small system. Ideally I would like to improve this to the point where just the Redis host, port, and credentials are provided to this provider for handling it's own connections/pooling.
• You are responsible for monitoring your working/processing list in Redis. If something goes wrong and an acknowledgement (LREM) is not handled - you will want some logic or process in place to move an item from the working list back to the main list.
• The Redis LREM command is O(N) - so the performance on this operation during acknowledgement will be based on the length of the list. I have been using this pattern for a number of years without problem, but be aware and do research on your own use-case to ensure this is not going to be a problem for you.

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Installation

Add :off_broadway_redis to the list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:off_broadway_redis, "~> 0.4.3"}
  ]
end

Usage

Configure Broadway with one or more producers using OffBroadway.Redis.Producer:

Broadway.start_link(MyBroadway,
  name: MyBroadway,
  producers: [
    default: [
      module: {
        OffBroadway.Redis.Producer,
        redis_instance: :some_redis_instance,
        list_name: "some_list",
        working_list_name: "some_list_processing"
      }
    ]
  ]
)

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Other Info

This library was created using the Broadway Custom Producers documentation for reference. I would encourage you to view that as well as the Broadway Architecture documentation for more information.

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License

MIT License

See the license file for details.