Kicks, né Sneakers

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What is Kicks?

Kicks is a high-performance RabbitMQ background processing framework for Ruby, originally developed by @jondot 👏 under the name of Sneakers. The original repo was abandoned by the person who has exclusive control over the RubyGems project, so the community of users has decided to move it to this "fork" (continuation) under the new name.

By virtue of its Sneakers lineage, Kicks is a mature project that has been around since 2016.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'kicks'

And then execute:

bundle

Or install it yourself as:

gem install kicks

Documentation

A quick start guide is available in the section below.

Visit the wiki for more detailed documentation and GitHub releases for release notes.

A change log is also available.

Quick start

Set up a Gemfile

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'kicks'
gem 'json'
gem 'redis'

How do we add a worker? Firstly create a file and name it as boot.rb then create a worker named as Processor.

touch boot.rb

# Note: the files still use "sneakers" for the name
require 'sneakers'
require 'redis'
require 'json'

$redis = Redis.new

class Processor
  include Sneakers::Worker
  from_queue :logs

  def work(msg)
    err = JSON.parse(msg)
    if err["type"] == "error"
      $redis.incr "processor:#{err["error"]}"
    end

    ack!
  end
end

Let's test it out quickly from the command line:

$ sneakers work Processor --require boot.rb

We just told Sneakers to spawn a worker named Processor, but first --require a file that we dedicate to setting up environment, including workers and what-not.

If you go to your RabbitMQ admin now, you'll see a new queue named logs was created. Push a couple messages like below:

{
   "type": "error",
   "message": "HALP!",
   "error": "CODE001"
}

Publish a message with the bunny gem RabbitMQ client:

require 'bunny'

conn = Bunny.new
conn.start

ch = conn.create_channel
ch.default_exchange.publish({ type: 'error', message: 'HALP!', error: 'CODE001' }.to_json, routing_key: 'logs')

conn.close

And this is the output you should see at your terminal.

2013-10-11T19:26:36Z p-4718 t-ovqgyb31o DEBUG: [worker-logs:1:213mmy][#<Thread:0x007fae6b05cc58>][logs][{:prefetch=>10, :durable=>true, :ack=>true, :heartbeat_interval=>2, :exchange=>"sneakers"}] Working off: log log
2013-10-11T19:26:36Z p-4718 t-ovqgyrxu4 INFO: log log
2013-10-11T19:26:40Z p-4719 t-ovqgyb364 DEBUG: [worker-logs:1:h23iit][#<Thread:0x007fae6b05cd98>][logs][{:prefetch=>10, :durable=>true, :ack=>true, :heartbeat_interval=>2, :exchange=>"sneakers"}] Working off: log log
2013-10-11T19:26:40Z p-4719 t-ovqgyrx8g INFO: log log

We'll count errors and error types with Redis.

$ redis-cli monitor
1381520329.888581 [0 127.0.0.1:49182] "incr" "processor:CODE001"

We're basically done with the ceremonies and all is left is to do some real work.

Looking at metrics

Let's use the logging_metrics provider just for the sake of fun of seeing the metrics as they happen.

# boot.rb
require 'sneakers'
require 'redis'
require 'json'
require 'sneakers/metrics/logging_metrics'
Sneakers.configure(metrics: Sneakers::Metrics::LoggingMetrics.new)

# ... rest of code

Now push a message again and you'll see:

2013-10-11T19:44:37Z p-9219 t-oxh8owywg INFO: INC: work.Processor.started
2013-10-11T19:44:37Z p-9219 t-oxh8owywg INFO: TIME: work.Processor.time 0.00242
2013-10-11T19:44:37Z p-9219 t-oxh8owywg INFO: INC: work.Processor.handled.ack

Which increments started and handled.ack, and times the work unit.

From here, you can continue over to the Wiki

Docker

If you use Docker, there's some benefits to be had and you can use both docker and docker-compose with this project, in order to run tests, integration tests or a sample worker without setting up RabbitMQ or the environment needed locally on your development box.

To build a container run docker build . -t sneakers_sneakers
To run non-integration tests within a docker container, run docker run --rm sneakers_sneakers:latest
To run full integration tests within a docker topology including RabbitMQ, Redis (for integration worker) run scripts/local_integration, which will use docker-compose to orchestrate the topology and the sneakers Docker image to run the tests
To run a sample worker within Docker, try the TitleScraper example by running script/local_worker. This will use docker-compose as well. It will also help you get a feeling for how to run Sneakers in a Docker based production environment
Use Dockerfile.slim instead of Dockerfile for production docker builds. It generates a more compact image, while the "regular" Dockerfile generates a fatter image - yet faster to iterate when developing

Compatibility

Kicks main branch: Ruby 3.0+
Kicks 3.1.x branch: Ruby 3.0+
Kicks 3.0.x: Ruby 2.5+
Sneakers 2.7.x and later (using Bunny 2.9): Ruby 2.2.x
Sneakers 1.1.x and later (using Bunny 2.x): Ruby 2.x
Sneakers 1.x.x and earlier: Ruby 1.9.x, 2.x

Contributing

Fork, implement, add tests, pull request, get my everlasting thanks and a respectable place here :).