Queueing jobs in Postgres from Node.js like a boss.

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

  boss.on('error', console.error)

  await boss.start()

  const queue = 'readme-queue'

  await boss.createQueue(queue)

  const id = await boss.send(queue, { arg1: 'read me' })

  console.log(`created job ${id} in queue ${queue}`)

  await boss.work(queue, async ([ job ]) => {
    console.log(`received job ${job.id} with data ${JSON.stringify(job.data)}`)
  })
}

readme()
  .catch(err => {
    console.log(err)
    process.exit(1)
  })

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 Postgres's SKIP LOCKED, a feature built specifically for message queues to resolve record locking challenges inherent with relational databases. This provides exactly-once delivery and the safety of guaranteed atomic commits to 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.

Summary

• Exactly-once job delivery
• Create jobs within your existing database transaction
• Backpressure-compatible polling workers
• Cron scheduling
• Queue storage policies to support a variety of rate limiting, debouncing, and concurrency use cases
• Priority queues, dead letter queues, job deferral, automatic retries with exponential backoff
• Pub/sub API for fan-out queue relationships
• SQL support for non-Node.js runtimes for most operations
• Serverless function compatible
• Multi-master compatible (for example, in a Kubernetes ReplicaSet)

CLI

pg-boss includes a command-line interface for managing database migrations without writing code. This is useful for CI/CD pipelines, database setup scripts, or manual schema management.

Installation

When installed globally, the CLI is available as pg-boss:

npm install -g pg-boss
pg-boss --help

Or run directly with npx:

npx pg-boss --help

Commands

Connection Configuration

The CLI supports multiple ways to configure the database connection, in order of precedence:

1. Command-line arguments

   pg-boss migrate --connection-string postgres://user:pass@host/database
   # or individual options
   pg-boss migrate --host localhost --port 5432 --database mydb --user postgres --password secret
   

2. Environment variables

   PGBOSS_DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:pass@host/database pg-boss migrate
   # or individual variables
   PGBOSS_HOST=localhost PGBOSS_PORT=5432 PGBOSS_DATABASE=mydb PGBOSS_USER=postgres PGBOSS_PASSWORD=secret pg-boss migrate
   

   This allows admin credentials for migrations to coexist with regular application database credentials (e.g., DATABASE_URL for the app, PGBOSS_DATABASE_URL for migrations).

3. Config file (pgboss.json or .pgbossrc in current directory, or specify with --config)

   pg-boss migrate --config ./config/pgboss.json
   

   Config file format:

   {
     "host": "localhost",
     "port": 5432,
     "database": "mydb",
     "user": "postgres",
     "password": "secret",
     "schema": "pgboss"
   }
   

Options

Examples

# Create schema in a new database
pg-boss create --connection-string postgres://localhost/myapp

# Run migrations in CI/CD pipeline
PGBOSS_DATABASE_URL=$PGBOSS_DATABASE_URL pg-boss migrate

# Preview migration SQL before running
pg-boss migrate --connection-string postgres://localhost/myapp --dry-run

# Check current schema version
pg-boss version -c postgres://localhost/myapp

# Use a custom schema name
pg-boss migrate -c postgres://localhost/myapp --schema myapp_jobs

# Output SQL for creating schema (useful for review or manual execution)
pg-boss plans create --schema myapp_jobs

Requirements

• Node 22.12 or higher for CommonJS's require(esm)
• PostgreSQL 13 or higher

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, linter and code coverage:

npm run cover

The test suite will try and create a new database named pgboss. The config.json file has the default credentials to connect to postgres.

The Docker Compose file can be used to start a local postgres instance for testing:

docker compose up