Overview
The fastest, most reliable, Redis-based distributed queue for Node. Carefully written for rock solid stability and atomicity. BullMQ is designed to fulfill the following goals:- Exactly once semantics - Attempts to deliver every message exactly one time, but will deliver at least once in the worst case scenario
- Horizontal scalability - Easy to scale by adding more workers for processing jobs in parallel
- Consistency - Reliable and consistent job processing
- High performance - Achieves the highest possible throughput from Redis by combining efficient Lua scripts and pipelining
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Core Concepts
BullMQ is based on 4 main classes that together can be used to resolve many different problems:Queue
Used for adding jobs to the queue and basic queue manipulation such as pausing, cleaning, or getting data from the queue.
Worker
Instances capable of processing jobs. You can have many workers running in the same process, separate processes, or different machines.
QueueEvents
Used to listen to global events like job completions, failures, and progress updates.
FlowProducer
Used for creating jobs with parent-child dependencies and complex job workflows.
Key Features
BullMQ provides a comprehensive set of features for queue management:- Minimal CPU usage - Polling-free design for optimal performance
- Distributed execution - Job execution based on Redis for distributed systems
- Job ordering - Support for LIFO and FIFO job processing
- Priorities - Prioritize important jobs over others
- Delayed jobs - Schedule jobs to be processed at a future time
- Repeatable jobs - Schedule jobs according to cron specifications
- Automatic retries - Failed jobs can be automatically retried
- Concurrency control - Set concurrency per worker
- Sandboxed processing - Threaded (sandboxed) processing functions for isolation
- Automatic recovery - Recover from process crashes
- Parent-Child dependencies - Create complex job workflows with dependencies
- Rate limiting - Control the rate of job processing
- Job events - Listen to various job lifecycle events
Why Use Message Queues?
If you’re new to message queues, you may wonder why they are needed. Queues can solve many different problems elegantly:- Smoothing processing peaks - Handle traffic spikes without overwhelming your system
- Microservices communication - Create robust communication channels between services
- Offloading heavy work - Distribute heavy workloads from one server to many workers
- Background processing - Handle time-consuming tasks asynchronously
- Job scheduling - Schedule tasks to run at specific times or intervals
- Reliability - Ensure jobs are processed even if services temporarily go down
Used By
BullMQ is trusted by many organizations, including:- Microsoft (Lage build system)
- Vendure (E-commerce framework)
- Datawrapper (Data visualization tool)
- NestJS (Progressive Node.js framework)
- Langfuse (LLM engineering platform)
- Novu (Notification infrastructure)
- NocoDB (Open source Airtable alternative)
- Infisical (Secret management platform)
Next Steps
Installation
Get started by installing BullMQ in your project
Quick Start
Create your first queue and worker in minutes
Architecture
Understand how BullMQ works under the hood
API Reference
Explore the complete API documentation