A High-Performance Redis Simple Message Queue for Node.js

What's New

• 05.09.2025: V9 is coming soon — a focused refinement of V8. It brings end-to-end message observability, a more robust and efficient message storage layer, and a new Web UI for managing queues.

• 13.04.2025: V8 is here! Major architecture improvements, Pub/Sub delivery model, worker threads, enhanced TypeScript support, and more. See release notes.

Key Features

• 🚀 High-performance message processing
• 🔄 Flexible producer/consumer model with multi-queue producers and consumers
• 🔀 Different exchange types (Direct, Topic, FanOut) for publishing messages to one or multiple queues
• 📬 Two delivery models (Point-2-Point and Pub/Sub) with reliable delivery and configurable retry modes
• 📊 Three queuing strategies (FIFO, LIFO, Priority Queues)
• 🧵 Message handler worker threads for sandboxing and performance improvement
• ⏱️ Message expiration and consumption timeout
• 🚦 Queue rate limiting for controlling message consumption rates
• 🕰️ Built-in scheduler for delayed message delivery and repeating messages
• 🌐 RESTful API and Web UI for interacting with the message queue
• 📦 Support for ESM and CJS modules

Use Cases

• Managing background tasks, such as email sending or data processing.
• Efficiently scheduling and retrying tasks.
• Communication between multiple services in microservices architectures.
• Handling real-time events in gaming, IoT, or analytics systems.

Installation

To get started with RedisSMQ, you can install core packages using npm:

npm i redis-smq@latest redis-smq-common@latest --save

Don't forget to install a Redis client. Choose either node-redis or ioredis:

npm install @redis/client --save
# or
npm install ioredis --save

Ecosystem

Package	Description
redis-smq	A high-performance, reliable, and scalable message queue for Node.js.
redis-smq-common	Provides essential components and utilities shared across RedisSMQ packages.
redis-smq-rest-api	A RESTful API for interacting with RedisSMQ, with OpenAPI v3 and Swagger UI.
redis-smq-web-server	A web server for the RedisSMQ Web UI, handling static assets, routing, and proxying.
redis-smq-web-ui	A Single Page Application (SPA) for monitoring and managing RedisSMQ.

Version compatibility

Always install matching versions of RedisSMQ packages. See Version Compatibility.

Configuration

Set up the RedisSMQ configuration during your application bootstrap:

'use strict';
const { Configuration } = require('redis-smq');
const { ERedisConfigClient } = require('redis-smq-common');

const config = {
  redis: {
    // Using ioredis as the Redis client
    client: ERedisConfigClient.IOREDIS,
    // Add any other ioredis options here
    options: {
      host: '127.0.0.1',
      port: 6379,
    },
  },
};

Configuration.getSetConfig(config);

Usage

Here's a basic example to create a queue, produce a message, and consume it:

// Creating a queue
const queue = new Queue();
queue.save('my_queue', EQueueType.LIFO_QUEUE, EQueueDeliveryModel.POINT_TO_POINT, (err) => {
    if (err) console.error(err);
});

// Producing a message
const msg = new ProducibleMessage();
msg.setQueue('my_queue').setBody('Hello Word!');
producer.produce(msg, (err, ids) => {
    if (err) console.error(err);
    else console.log(`Produced message IDs are: ${ids.join(', ')}`);
});

// Consuming a message
const consumer = new Consumer();
const messageHandler = (msg, cb) => {
    console.log(msg.body);
    cb(); // Acknowledging
};
consumer.consume('my_queue', messageHandler, (err) => {
    if (err) console.error(err);
});

Documentation

For more information, visit the RedisSMQ Docs.

Contributing

Interested in contributing to this project? Please check out our CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

RedisSMQ is released under the MIT License.