NATS Streaming - Node.js Client

Node NATS Streaming is an extremely performant, lightweight reliable streaming platform powered by NATS for Node.js.

NATS Streaming provides the following high-level feature set:

• Log based persistence
• At-Least-Once Delivery model, giving reliable message delivery
• Rate matched on a per subscription basis
• Replay/Restart
• Last Value Semantics

Installation

npm install node-nats-streaming

Basic Usage

#!/usr/bin/env node

"use-strict";

var stan = require('node-nats-streaming').connect('test-cluster', 'test');

stan.on('connect', function () {

  // Simple Publisher (all publishes are async in the node version of the client)
  stan.publish('foo', 'Hello node-nats-streaming!', function(err, guid){
    if(err) {
      console.log('publish failed: ' + err);
    } else {
      console.log('published message with guid: ' + guid);
    }
  });

  // Subscriber can specify how many existing messages to get.
  var opts = stan.subscriptionOptions().setStartWithLastReceived();
  var subscription = stan.subscribe('foo', opts);
  subscription.on('message', function (msg) {
    console.log('Received a message [' + msg.getSequence() + '] ' + msg.getData());
  });

  // After one second, unsubscribe, when that is done, close the connection
  setTimeout(function() {
    subscription.unsubscribe();
    subscription.on('unsubscribed', function() {
      stan.close();
    });
  }, 1000);
});

stan.on('close', function() {
  process.exit();
});

Subscription Start (i.e. Replay) Options

NATS Streaming subscriptions are similar to NATS subscriptions, but clients may start their subscription at an earlier point in the message stream, allowing them to receive messages that were published before this client registered interest.

The options are described with examples below:

  // Subscribe starting with the most recently published value
  var opts = stan.subscriptionOptions();
  opts.setStartWithLastReceived();
  var subscription = stan.subscribe('foo', opts);
  
  // Receive all stored values in order
  var opts = stan.subscriptionOptions();
  opts.setDeliverAllAvailable();
  var subscription = stan.subscribe('foo', opts);
  
  // Receive all messages starting at a specific sequence number
  var opts = stan.subscriptionOptions();
  opts.setStartAtSequence(22);
  var subscription = stan.subscribe('foo', opts);
  
  // Subscribe starting at a specific time
  var d = new Date(2016, 7, 8); // August 8th, 2016
  var opts = stan.subscriptionOptions();
  opts.setStartTime(d);
  var subscription = stan.subscribe('foo', opts);
  
  // Subscribe starting at a specific amount of time in the past (e.g. 30 seconds ago)
  var opts = stan.subscriptionOptions();
  opts.setStartAtTimeDelta(30*1000); // 30 seconds ago
  var subscription = stan.subscribe('foo', opts);

Wildcard Subscriptions

NATS Streaming subscriptions do not support wildcards.

Durable Subscriptions

Replay of messages offers great flexibility for clients wishing to begin processing at some earlier point in the data stream. However, some clients just need to pick up where they left off from an earlier session, without having to manually track their position in the stream of messages. Durable subscriptions allow clients to assign a durable name to a subscription when it is created. Doing this causes the NATS Streaming server to track the last acknowledged message for that clientID + durable name, so that only messages since the last acknowledged message will be delivered to the client.

var stan = require('node-nats-streaming').connect('test-cluster', 'client-123');

stan.on('connect', function () {
  // Subscribe with durable name
  var opts = stan.subscriptionOptions();
  opts.setDeliverAllAvailable();
  opts.setDurableName('my-durable');

  var durableSub = stan.subscribe('foo', opts);
  durableSub.on('message', function(msg) {
    console.log('Received a message: ' + msg.getData());
  });

  //... 
  // client suspends durable subscription
  //
  durableSub.close();

  //...
  // client resumes durable subscription
  //
  durableSub = stan.subscribe('foo', opts);
  durableSub.on('message', function(msg) {
    console.log('Received a message: ' + msg.getData());
  });

  // ...
  // client receives message sequence 1-40, and disconnects
  stan.close();

  // client reconnects in the future with same clientID
  var stan = require('node-nats-streaming').connect('test-cluster', 'client-123');
  var durableSub = stan.subscribe('foo', opts);
  durableSub.on('message', function(msg) {
    console.log('Received a message: ' + msg.getData());
  });
});

Queue Groups

Subscriptions with the same queue name will form a queue group. Each message is only delivered to a single subscriber per queue group. You can have as many queue groups as you wish. Normal subscribers are not affected by queue group semantics.

    var opts = stan.subscriptionOptions();
    opts.setStartWithLastReceived();
    var subscription = stan.subscribe('foo', 'foo.workers', opts);

Asynchronous Publishing

For each message published, a NUID is generated for the message on creation. When the message is received by the server, the client library is notified on its optional callback:

    var guid = stan.publish('foo', 'Hello World!', function(err, aGuid){
      // err will be undefined if the message was accepted by the 
      // NATS streaming server
      if(err) {
        console.log('Error publishing: ' + aGuid + ' - ' + err);
      }
    });

Message Acknowledgements and Redelivery

NATS Streaming offers At-Least-Once delivery semantics, meaning that once a message has been delivered to an eligible subscriber, if an acknowledgement is not received within the configured timeout interval, NATS Streaming will attempt redelivery of the message. This timeout interval is specified by the subscription option SubscriptionOptions#setAckWait(millis), which defaults to 30 seconds.

By default, messages are automatically acknowledged by the NATS Streaming client library after the subscriber's message handler is invoked. However, there may be cases in which the subscribing client wishes to accelerate or defer acknowledgement of the message. To do this, the client must set manual acknowledgement mode on the subscription, and invoke Message#ack() on the Message.

    var opts = stan.subscriptionOptions();
    opts.setManualAckMode(true);
    opts.setAckWait(60*1000); //60s

    var sub = stan.subscribe('Foo', opts);

    sub.on('message', function (msg) {
      // do something with the message
      msg.ack();        
    });

Synchronous Publishing

The Nodejs client does not support synchronous publishing.

Rate limiting/matching

A classic problem of publish-subscribe messaging is matching the rate of message producers with the rate of message consumers. Message producers can often outpace the speed of the subscribers that are consuming their messages. This mismatch is commonly called a "fast producer/slow consumer" problem, and may result in dramatic resource utilization spikes in the underlying messaging system as it tries to buffer messages until the slow consumer(s) can catch up.

Under Nodejs, this is even more important, as in Nodejs is a single-threaded environment. This means that if your application is CPU bound, it is possible for your application to block the processing of outgoing or incoming messages.

Publisher rate limiting

NATS Streaming provides a connection option called maxPubAcksInflight that effectively limits the number of unacknowledged messages that a publisher may have in-flight at any given time. When this maximum is reached, your publisher's callback will be invoked with an error. If not callback was defined, an error will be thrown until the number of unacknowledged messages fall below the specified limit.

Subscriber rate limiting

Rate limiting may also be accomplished on the subscriber side, on a per-subscription basis, using a subscription option called SubscriptionOptions#setMaxInFlight(number). This option specifies the maximum number of outstanding acknowledgements (messages that have been delivered but not acknowledged) that NATS Streaming will allow for a given subscription. When this limit is reached, NATS Streaming will suspend delivery of messages to this subscription until the number of unacknowledged messages falls below the specified limit.

Supported Node Versions

Support policy for Nodejs versions follows Nodejs release support. We will support and build node-nats-streaming on even Nodejs versions that are current or in maintenance.

License

Unless otherwise noted, the NATS source files are distributed under the Apache Version 2.0 license found in the LICENSE file.