Vendure Worker

The Vendure Worker is a process responsible for running computationally intensive or otherwise long-running tasks in the background. For example, updating a search index or sending emails. Running such tasks in the background allows the server to stay responsive, since a response can be returned immediately without waiting for the slower tasks to complete.

Put another way, the Worker executes jobs registered with the JobQueueService.

The worker is started by calling the bootstrapWorker() function with the same configuration as is passed to the main server bootstrap():

import { bootstrapWorker } from '@vendure/core';
import { config } from './vendure-config';

bootstrapWorker(config)
  // We must explicitly start the job queue in order for this
  // worker instance to start listening for and processing jobs.
  .then(worker => worker.startJobQueue())
  .catch(err => {
    console.log(err);
    process.exit(1);
  });

Underlying architecture

The Worker is a NestJS standalone application. This means it is almost identical to the main server app, but does not have any network layer listening for requests. The server communicates with the worker via a “job queue” architecture. The exact implementation of the job queue is dependent on the configured JobQueueStrategy - see the Job Queue guide for more details.

Multiple workers

It is possible to run multiple workers in parallel to better handle heavy loads. Using the JobQueueOptions.activeQueues configuration, it is even possible to have particular workers dedicated to one or more specific types of jobs. For example, if your application does video transcoding, you might want to set up a dedicated worker just for that task:

import { bootstrapWorker, mergeConfig } from '@vendure/core';
import { config } from './vendure-config';

const videoWorkerConfig = mergeConfig(config, {
  jobQueueOptions: {
    activeQueues: ['transcode-video'],
  }
})

bootstrapWorker(videoWorkerConfig)
  .then(worker => worker.startJobQueue())
  .catch(err => {
    console.log(err);
    process.exit(1);
  });

Running jobs on the main process

It is possible to run jobs from the Job Queue on the main server. This is mainly used for testing and automated tasks, and is not advised for production use, since it negates the benefits of running long tasks off of the main process. To do so, you need to manually start the JobQueueService:

import { bootstrap, JobQueueService } from '@vendure/core';
import { config } from './vendure-config';

bootstrap(config)
  .then(app => app.get(JobQueueService).start())
  .catch(err => {
    console.log(err);
    process.exit(1);
  });

Running custom code on the worker

If you are authoring a Vendure plugin to implement custom functionality, you can also make use of the worker process in order to handle long-running or computationally-demanding tasks. See the Plugin Examples page for an example of this.

ProcessContext

Sometimes your code may need to be aware of whether it is being run as part of a server or worker process. In this case you can inject the ProcessContext provider and query it like this:

import { Injectable, OnApplicationBootstrap } from '@nestjs/common';
import { ProcessContext } from '@vendure/core';

@Injectable()
export class MyService implements OnApplicationBootstrap {
  constructor(private processContext: ProcessContext) {}

  onApplicationBootstrap() {
    if (this.processContext.isServer) {
      // code which will only execute when running in
      // the server process
    }
  }
}