sqs-consumer

Build SQS-based applications without the boilerplate. Just define an async function that handles the SQS message processing.

Installation

To install this package, simply enter the following command into your terminal (or the variant of whatever package manager you are using):

npm install sqs-consumer
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If you would like to use JSR instead, you can find the package here.

Node version

We will only support Node versions that are actively or security supported by the Node team. If you are still using an Node 14, please use a version of this library before the v7 release, if you are using Node 16, please use a version before the v7.3.0 release.

Documentation

Visit https://bbc.github.io/sqs-consumer/ for the full API documentation.

Usage

import { Consumer } from "sqs-consumer";

const app = Consumer.create({
  queueUrl: "https://sqs.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/account-id/queue-name",
  handleMessage: async (message) => {
    // do some work with `message`
  },
});

app.on("error", (err) => {
  console.error(err.message);
});

app.on("processing_error", (err) => {
  console.error(err.message);
});

app.start();
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• The queue is polled continuously for messages using long polling.
• Throwing an error (or returning a rejected promise) from the handler function will cause the message to be left on the queue. An SQS redrive policy can be used to move messages that cannot be processed to a dead letter queue.
• By default messages are processed one at a time – a new message won't be received until the first one has been processed. To process messages in parallel, use the batchSize option detailed here.
  • It's also important to await any processing that you are doing to ensure that messages are processed one at a time.
• By default, messages that are sent to the handleMessage and handleMessageBatch functions will be considered as processed if they return without an error.
  • To acknowledge individual messages, please return the message that you want to acknowledge if you are using handleMessage or the messages for handleMessageBatch.
    • To note, returning an empty object or an empty array will be considered an acknowledgement of no message(s) and will result in no messages being deleted. If you would like to change this behaviour, please use the alwaysAcknowledge option detailed here.
    • By default, if an object or an array is not returned, all messages will be acknowledged.
• Messages are deleted from the queue once the handler function has completed successfully (the above items should also be taken into account).

Credentials

By default the consumer will look for AWS credentials in the places specified by the AWS SDK. The simplest option is to export your credentials as environment variables:

export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=...
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If you need to specify your credentials manually, you can use a pre-configured instance of the SQS Client client.

import { Consumer } from "sqs-consumer";
import { SQSClient } from "@aws-sdk/client-sqs";

const app = Consumer.create({
  queueUrl: "https://sqs.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/account-id/queue-name",
  handleMessage: async (message) => {
    // ...
  },
  sqs: new SQSClient({
    region: "my-region",
    credentials: {
      accessKeyId: "yourAccessKey",
      secretAccessKey: "yourSecret",
    },
  }),
});

app.on("error", (err) => {
  console.error(err.message);
});

app.on("processing_error", (err) => {
  console.error(err.message);
});

app.on("timeout_error", (err) => {
  console.error(err.message);
});

app.start();
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AWS IAM Permissions

Consumer will receive and delete messages from the SQS queue. Ensure sqs:ReceiveMessage, sqs:DeleteMessage, sqs:DeleteMessageBatch, sqs:ChangeMessageVisibility and sqs:ChangeMessageVisibilityBatch access is granted on the queue being consumed.

API

Consumer.create(options)

Creates a new SQS consumer using the defined options.

consumer.start()

Start polling the queue for messages.

consumer.stop(options)

Stop polling the queue for messages. You can find the options definition here.

By default, the value of abort is set to false which means pre existing requests to AWS SQS will still be made until they have concluded. If you would like to abort these requests instead, pass the abort value as true, like so:

consumer.stop({ abort: true })

consumer.status

Returns the current status of the consumer.

• isRunning - true if the consumer has been started and not stopped, false if was not started or if it was stopped.
• isPolling - true if the consumer is actively polling, false if it is not.

Note: This method is not available in versions before v9.0.0 and replaced the method isRunning to supply both running and polling states.

consumer.updateOption(option, value)

Updates the provided option with the provided value.

Please note that any update of the option pollingWaitTimeMs will take effect only on next polling cycle.

You can find out more about this here.

Events

Each consumer is an EventEmitter and emits these events.

Contributing

We welcome and appreciate contributions for anyone who would like to take the time to fix a bug or implement a new feature.

But before you get started, please read the contributing guidelines and code of conduct.

License

SQS Consumer is distributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0, see LICENSE for more information.