• Isolation

  Do not let different consumers process the same message.

• Reliablity

  Do not let a failed consumer disappear an item.

• Atomic

  Operations on the queue are atomic.

A queue can be instantiated with a mongo collection and a consumer identifier. The consumer identifier helps distinguish multiple queue consumers that are taking jobs from the queue:

>> from pymongo import Connection
>> from mongoqueue import MongoQueue
>> queue = MongoQueue(
...   Connection(TEST_DB).doctest_queue,
...   consumer_id="consumer-1",
...   timeout=300,
...   max_attempts=3)

The MongoQueue class timeout parameters specifies how long in a seconds a how long a job may be held by a consumer before its considered failed.

A job which timeouts or errors more than the max_attempts parameter is considered permanently failed, and will no longer be processed.

New jobs/items can be placed in the queue by passing a dictionary:

>> queue.put({"foobar": 1})

A job priority key and integer value can be specified in the dictionary which will cause the job to be processed before lower priority items:

>> queue.put({"foobar": 0}, priority=1})

An item can be fetched out by calling the next method on a queue. This returns a Job object:

>> job = queue.next()
>> job.payload
{"foobar": 1}

The job class exposes some control methods on the job, for marking progress, completion, errors, or releasing the job back into the queue.

• complete Marks a job as complete and removes it from the queue.

• error Optionally specified with a message, releases the job back to the

  queue, and increments its attempts, and stores the error message on the job.

• progress Optionally takes a progress count integer, notes progress on the job

  and resets the lock timeout.

• release Release a job back to the pool. The attempts counter is not modified.

As a convience the job supports the context manager protocol:

>> with job as data:
...   print data['payload']

{"foobar: 0}

If the context closure is exited without the job is marked complete, if there's an exception the error is stored on the job.

• [0] https://github.com/skiz/mongo_queue/blob/master/lib/mongo_queue.rb
• [1] http://blog.boxedice.com/2011/09/28/replacing-rabbitmq-with-mongodb/
• [2] http://blog.boxedice.com/2011/04/13/queueing-mongodb-using-mongodb/
• [3] https://github.com/lunaru/mongoqueue
• [4] http://www.captaincodeman.com/2011/05/28/simple-service-bus-message-queue-mongodb/

Unit tests can be run with

$ python setup.py nosetests

0.6.0 - Feb 4th, 2013 - Isolate passed in data from metadata in Job. 0.5.2 - Dec 9th, 2012 - Fix for regression in sort parameters from pymongo 2.4 0.5.1 - Dec 2nd, 2012 - Packaging fix for readme data file.

Kapil Thangavelu, author & maintainer Dustin Laurence, sort fix for pymongo 2.4 Jonathan Sackett, Job data isolation.