Getting Started

This guide gives you an overview of the async-job gem and explains the core concepts.

Installation

Add the gem to your project:

$ bundle add async-job

Core Concepts

async-job is a library for building asynchronous job queues.

Several included class Async::Job::Queue implementations for enqueueing and running jobs.
Several supported module Async::Job::Coder implementations for encoding and decoding job payloads.
A class Async::Job::Generic class which describes the minimum required job interface.

The async-job library provides a framework for enqueueing and dequeuing jobs, without prescribing how jobs are executed. It is expected that you would use this library to wrap existing schemas for job definition and execution. This design allows you to use async-job in a wide variety of applications, without the need for cumbersome wrappers.

Usage

In general, a job processing system pipeline comprises two parts: a client that submits jobs into a queue, and a server that reads jobs out of a queue and processes them.

sequenceDiagram participant A as Client (Application) participant ME as Middleware (Enqueue) participant S as Server (Queue) participant MD as Middleware (Dequeue) participant H as Delegate Note over A,S: Client A->>+ME: Submit Job ME->>+S: Enqueue Job Note over S,H: Server S->>+MD: Dequeue Job MD->>+H: Execute Job

You can use class Async::Job::Builder to create a pipeline that includes both the producer and consumer sides of a queue:

require "async"
require "async/job"
require "async/job/processor/inline"

# This is how we execute a job from the queue:
executor = proc do |job|
	puts "Processing job: #{job}"
end

# Create a simple inline pipeline:
pipeline = Async::Job::Builder.build(executor) do
	# We are going to use an inline processor which processes the job in the background using Async{}:
	enqueue Async::Job::Processor::Inline
end

# Enqueue a job:
Async do
	pipeline.call("My job")
	# Prints "Processing job: My job"
end

Rails Integration

You can use async-job with Rails's ActiveJob framework by using the async-job-adapter-active_job gem. This allows you to use async-job as a backend for ActiveJob, which is useful for integrating with existing Rails applications.

Redis Processor

The async-job-processor-redis gem provides a Redis-based processor for async-job. This processor is similar to Sidekiq, and is designed to provide a similar interface and feature set.