Background Jobs

This crate provides tooling required to run some processes asynchronously from a usually synchronous application. The standard example of this is Web Services, where certain things need to be processed, but processing them while a user is waiting for their browser to respond might not be the best experience.

• Read the documentation on docs.rs
• Find the crate on crates.io
• Join the discussion on Matrix

Usage

Add Background Jobs to your project

[dependencies]
actix = "0.8"
background-jobs = "0.6.0"
failure = "0.1"
futures = "0.1"
serde = "1.0"
serde_drive = "1.0"
sled = "0.28"

To get started with Background Jobs, first you should define a job.

Jobs are a combination of the data required to perform an operation, and the logic of that operation. They implment the Job, serde::Serialize, and serde::DeserializeOwned.

use background_jobs::Job;
use failure::Error;
use serde_derive::{Deserialize, Serialize};

#[derive(Clone, Debug, Deserialize, Serialize)]
pub struct MyJob {
    some_usize: usize,
    other_usize: usize,
}

impl MyJob {
    pub fn new(some_usize: usize, other_usize: usize) -> Self {
        MyJob {
            some_usize,
            other_usize,
        }
    }
}

impl Job for MyJob {
    type Processor = MyProcessor; // We will define this later
    type State = ();
    type Future = Result<(), Error>;

    fn run(self, _: Self::State) -> Self::Future {
        info!("args: {:?}", self);

        Ok(())
    }
}

The run method for a job takes an additional argument, which is the state the job expects to use. The state for all jobs defined in an application must be the same. By default, the state is an empty tuple, but it's likely you'll want to pass in some Actix address, or something else.

Let's re-define the job to care about some application state.

#[derive(Clone, Debug)]
pub struct MyState {
    pub app_name: String,
}

impl MyState {
    pub fn new(app_name: &str) -> Self {
        MyState {
            app_name: app_name.to_owned(),
        }
    }
}

impl Job for MyJob {
    type Processor = MyProcessor; // We will define this later
    type State = MyState;
    type Future = Result<(), Error>;

    fn run(self, state: Self::State) -> Self::Future {
        info!("{}: args, {:?}", state.app_name, self);

        Ok(())
    }
}

Next, define a Processor.

Processors are types that define default attributes for jobs, as well as containing some logic used internally to perform the job. Processors must implement Proccessor and Clone.

use background_jobs::{Backoff, MaxRetries, Processor};

const DEFAULT_QUEUE: &'static str = "default";

#[derive(Clone, Debug)]
pub struct MyProcessor;

impl Processor for MyProcessor {
    // The kind of job this processor should execute
    type Job = MyJob;

    // The name of the processor. It is super important that each processor has a unique name,
    // because otherwise one processor will overwrite another processor when they're being
    // registered.
    const NAME: &'static str = "MyProcessor";

    // The queue that this processor belongs to
    //
    // Workers have the option to subscribe to specific queues, so this is important to
    // determine which worker will call the processor
    //
    // Jobs can optionally override the queue they're spawned on
    const QUEUE: &'static str = DEFAULT_QUEUE;

    // The number of times background-jobs should try to retry a job before giving up
    //
    // Jobs can optionally override this value
    const MAX_RETRIES: MaxRetries = MaxRetries::Count(1);

    // The logic to determine how often to retry this job if it fails
    //
    // Jobs can optionally override this value
    const BACKOFF_STRATEGY: Backoff = Backoff::Exponential(2);
}

Running jobs

By default, this crate ships with the background-jobs-actix feature enabled. This uses the background-jobs-actix crate to spin up a Server and Workers, and provides a mechanism for spawning new jobs.

background-jobs-actix on it's own doesn't have a mechanism for storing worker state. This can be implemented manually by implementing the Storage trait from background-jobs-core, the in-memory store provided in the background-jobs-core crate can be used, or the background-jobs-sled-storage crate can be used to provide a Sled-backed jobs store.

With that out of the way, back to the examples:

Main

use actix::System;
use background_jobs::{ServerConfig, WorkerConfig};
use failure::Error;

fn main() -> Result<(), Error> {
    // First set up the Actix System to ensure we have a runtime to spawn jobs on.
    let sys = System::new("my-actix-system");

    // Set up our Storage
    // For this example, we use the default in-memory storage mechanism
    use background_jobs::memory_storage::Storage;
    let storage = Storage::new();

    /*
    // Optionally, a storage backend using the Sled database is provided
    use sled::{ConfigBuilder, Db};
    use background_jobs::sled_storage::Storage;
    let db = Db::start(ConfigBuilder::default().temporary(true).build())?;
    let storage = Storage::new(db)?;
    */

    // Start the application server. This guards access to to the jobs store
    let queue_handle = ServerConfig::new(storage).thread_count(8).start();

    // Configure and start our workers
    WorkerConfig::new(move || MyState::new("My App"))
        .register(MyProcessor)
        .set_processor_count(DEFAULT_QUEUE, 16)
        .start(queue_handle.clone());

    // Queue our jobs
    queue_handle.queue(MyJob::new(1, 2))?;
    queue_handle.queue(MyJob::new(3, 4))?;
    queue_handle.queue(MyJob::new(5, 6))?;

    // Block on Actix
    sys.run()?;
    Ok(())
}

Complete Example

For the complete example project, see the examples folder

Bringing your own server/worker implementation

If you want to create your own jobs processor based on this idea, you can depend on the background-jobs-core crate, which provides the Processor and Job traits, as well as some other useful types for implementing a jobs processor and job store.

Contributing

Feel free to open issues for anything you find an issue with. Please note that any contributed code will be licensed under the GPLv3.

License

This work is licensed under the Cooperative Software License. This is not a Free Software License, but may be considered a "source-available License." For most hobbyists, self-employed developers, worker-owned companies, and cooperatives, this software can be used in most projects so long as this software is distributed under the terms of the CSL. For more information, see the provided LICENSE file. If none exists, the license can be found online here. If you are a free software project and wish to use this software under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, please contact me at asonix@asonix.dog and we can sort that out. If you wish to use this project under any other license, especially in proprietary software, the answer is likely no.