graphile/worker

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

2378 stars · 124 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Graphile Worker is a high-performance job queue for PostgreSQL that runs background jobs on Node.js, supporting retries with exponential backoff, cron scheduling, and job creation via SQL triggers or functions. It keeps infrastructure simple by using Postgres as the queue store, achieving low-latency job pickup through LISTEN/NOTIFY.

Use cases

• run background jobs like sending emails without blocking HTTP responses
• schedule recurring cron tasks with minute-level granularity
• process jobs created by PostgreSQL triggers or stored procedures
• queue PDF generation or calculation tasks from a Node.js app
• replace a dedicated message broker with just Postgres and Node
• debounce and cancel scheduled jobs
• implement an outbox pattern without extra infrastructure

When to choose

• your stack is already PostgreSQL-backed and you want to avoid running a separate broker like RabbitMQ or Redis
• you need reliable at-least-once execution with automatic retries and backoff
• jobs must be enqueued from inside the database via SQL
• you want a simple, low-maintenance setup for a small engineering team
• you need high throughput (up to ~10k jobs/sec) with millisecond latency

When to avoid

• you need multi-language workers beyond Node.js
• you require advanced routing, fan-out, or complex message semantics of a dedicated broker
• your team already operates and maintains a mature message-queue system
• you need queue features like dead-letter exchanges or per-queue ACLs

Facets

library · maturity active

message-queue scheduling workflow-automation cli developer-tools backend databases developer-tools web-development cli cross-platform job-queue postgresql background-jobs cron listen-notify typescript task-scheduling outbox-pattern automation nodejs

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="graphile/worker")