Simple amqp library

Purpose and features

This library is intended for doing simple publish and subscribe to an amqp broker.

• Easy and declarative way to use an amqp broker for publishing and subscribing.
• Hides underlying amqp details as much as possible.
• Tries to maintain amqp best practices such as: per-application connection, separate channels for subscriptions and publishing, consumer cancel notifications, confirm channels, heartbeats etc.
• Resilient to runtime errors such as connection problems etc.
• Optimized for simple apps with a handful of subscriptions. For heavy-duty messaging, consider a library more closely attached to the amqp protocol such as https://www.npmjs.com/package/amqplib

Limitations:

• Uses a single exchange defined in behaviour options for all operations. Makes the API smaller and easier to work with
• One connection used for entire node js process
• Two channels, one for publishing and one for subscribing.
• The exchange type will always be "topic"

Api

Exposes a single function that boostraps a broker object, which in turn can be used for publishing and consuming messages. The connection will be re-established in case of errors.

For example:

const init = require("exp-amqp-connection");
const behaviour = {
  exchange: "my-exchange",
  url: "amqp://localhost"
};
const broker = init(behaviour);

broker.subscribeTmp("routingKey1", console.log);
broker.subscribeTmp("routingKey2", console.log);

broker.publish("routingKey1", "Msg 1");
broker.publish("routingKey1", "Msg 2");

// Delay delivery with 3000 ms using temporary exchange/queue-pair and dead-lettering.
broker.delayedPublish("routingKey2", "Msg 3", 3000);

Options

The following options are accepted:

• url: amqp url. This is where you specify amqp server adress/port, username, password etc. (example: "amqp://user:pass@localhost:15675")
• exchange: exchange to use, set to "" to use the built-in default exchange.
• ack: set to true if messages receiver should be acked (see "subscribe" in examples folder). Defaults to false.
• prefetch: Maximum allowed number of messages awaiting acknowledgement. Only applicable if "ack" is true. Defaults to 20.
• confirm: whether or not to use confirm mode for publishing. If enabled, a callback can be added to the publish call to see if the publish was successful or not. Defaults to false.
• heartbeat. Send heartbeats at regular intervals to ensure that the server is reachable. Defaults to 10 seconds. Set to 0 to disable heartbeats.
• productName: will show up in the admin interface for the connection. Great for debugging purpouses. Defaults to node app name and version from package.json.
• queueArguments: broker-specific args for creating queues ("x-message-ttl", "x-max-priority" etc)
• configKey: key for connection re-use.
• logger: A logger object implementing error, warning, info, debug for example https://github.com/tj/log.js

Broker

The broker object returned has the following functions. See the examples for more info on parameters etc.

publish(routingKey, message, callback)

Regular publish

delayedPublish(routingKey, message, delay, callback)

Delayed publish using dead-letter-hack: https://www.cloudamqp.com/docs/delayed-messages.html

subscribe(routingKey, queue, handler)

Subscribe using named durable queue. If you need to wait for the subscription to start, use .on("subscribed", (sub) => ...)

subscribeTmp(routingKey, handler)

Subscribe using nameless tmp queue. Queue will be destroyed when the broker disconnects. If you need to wait for the subscription to start, use .on("subscribed", (sub) => ...)

shutdown(callback)

Shuts down connection to broker.

events

• "error": in case of amqp errors
• "connected": when connected to amqp server
• "subscribed": when subscription is started

Multiple connections

By default one and only one connection is maintained for the entire process. It is possible to add more by initializing with another configKey.

For example:

const init = require("exp-amqp-connection");
const behaviour = {
  exchange: "my-exchange",
  url: "amqp://localhost",
  configKey: "my-amqp"
};

// 1st connection
const broker = init(behaviour);

const otherBehaviour = {
   url: "amqp://otherhost",
   exchange: "other-exchange",
   configKey: "other-amqp"
}

const broker2 = init(behaviour2)