Better SQS

Making it easier for you to quickly interact with SQS in an idiomatic fashion.

Status

Usage

require "better_sqs"

better = BetterSqs::Client.new 
better.push "better_sqs_dev_queue", "You pushed the message successfully!"
# At this point you can confirm that the message was enqueued in the AWS console
message = better.reserve "better_sqs_dev_queue"
 
puts message.message_body

message.delete

If you prefer you can interact with a Queue directly for enqueue and dequeue operations

require "better_sqs"

better = BetterSqs::Client.new
queue = better.queue "better_sqs_dev_queue"
queue.push "You pushed the message successfully!"
message = queue.reserve

puts message.message_body
message.delete

Inspecting a queue

BetterSqs makes it easy to check on the attributes of a SQS queue.

require "better_sqs"

better = BetterSqs::Client.new
queue = better.queue("better_sqs_dev_queue")
queue.approximate_number_of_messages
queue.approximate_number_of_messages_not_visible
queue.visibility_timeout
queue.created_timestamp
queue.last_modified_timestamp
queue.policy
queue.maximum_message_size
queue.message_retention_period
queue.queue_arn
queue.approximate_number_of_messages_delayed
queue.delay_seconds
queue.receive_message_wait_time_seconds
queue.redrive_policy

Configuration

To configure BetterSqs use the configuration block pattern

require "better_sqs"
BetterSqs.configure do |config|
    # When a message is deferred, this number of seconds is added to the time period that the message
    # will remain invisible to other consumers. SQS has a hard cap of 12 hours on visibility.
    # It defaults to 60 seconds
    config.sqs_message_deferral_seconds = 120
    
    # If you want to hardcode which region of SQS should be used then you can set this option. It is recommended
    # to use the environment variable ENV["AWS_REGION"] instead
    config.region = "us-west-2"
    
    # for aws_access_key_id and aws_secret_access_key you can set them in this fashion, but it is strongly
    # recommended that you just use the environment variables instead: ENV["AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID"], 
    # ENV["AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"]
end

Batch enqueuing

The AWS SDK does expose the ability to batch insert messages to an SQS queue. But it imposes some rather ridiculous restrictions on this feature. Specificially:

Each batch is limited to up to 10 messages
The sum of the message lengths cannot exceed 256 KBs (the normal per message limit is 256KB)

The feature does offer one (possibly) useful / interesting aspect

For a FIFO queue, multiple messages within a single batch are enqueued in the order they are sent.

When we need to enqueue a large number of messages we've had decent luck using https://github.com/grosser/parallel

better_sqs