Protobuf::Nats

An rpc client and server library built using the protobuf gem and the NATS protocol.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'protobuf-nats'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install protobuf-nats

You can also use the following environment variables to tune parameters:

PB_NATS_SERVER_MAX_QUEUE_SIZE - The size of the queue in front of your thread pool (default: thread count passed to CLI).

PB_NATS_SERVER_PAUSE_FILE_PATH - If this file exists, the server will pause by unsubscribing all services. When the file is removed it will resubscribe and restart slow start (default: nil).

PB_NATS_SERVER_SLOW_START_DELAY - Seconds to wait before adding another round of subscriptions (default 10).

PB_NATS_SERVER_SUBSCRIPTIONS_PER_RPC_ENDPOINT - Number of subscriptions to create for each rpc endpoint. This number is used to allow JVM based servers to warm-up slowly to prevent jolts in runtime performance across your RPC network (default: 10).

PB_NATS_CLIENT_ACK_TIMEOUT - Seconds to wait for an ACK from the rpc server (default: 5 seconds).

PB_NATS_CLIENT_NACK_BACKOFF_INTERVALS - Array of milliseconds to wait between NACK retries (default: "0,1,3,5,10").

PB_NATS_CLIENT_NACK_BACKOFF_SPLAY_LIMIT - Milliseconds to add to the NACK backoff timeout to avoid bursting retries (default: 10 milliseconds).

PB_NATS_CLIENT_RESPONSE_TIMEOUT - Seconds to wait for a non-ACK response from the rpc server (default: 60 seconds).

PB_NATS_CLIENT_RECONNECT_DELAY - If we detect a reconnect delay, we will wait this many seconds (default: the ACK timeout).

PB_NATS_CLIENT_SUBSCRIPTION_POOL_SIZE - If subscription pooling is desired for the request/response cycle then the pool size maximum should be set; the pool is lazy and therefore will only start new subscriptions as necessary (default: 0)

PROTOBUF_NATS_CONFIG_PATH - Custom path to the config yaml (default: "config/protobuf_nats.yml").

The client and server are configured via environment variables defined in the pure-ruby-nats gem. However, there are a few params which cannot be set: servers, uses_tls, subscription_key_replacements, and connect_timeout, so those my be defined in a yml file.

The library will automatically look for a file with a relative path of config/protobuf_nats.yml, but you may override this by specifying a different file via the PROTOBUF_NATS_CONFIG_PATH env variable.

The subscription_key_replacements feature is something we have found useful for local testing, but it is subject to breaking changes.

An example config looks like this:

# Stored at config/protobuf_nats.yml
---
  production:
    servers:
      - "nats://127.0.0.1:4222"
      - "nats://127.0.0.1:4223"
      - "nats://127.0.0.1:4224"
    max_reconnect_attempts: 500
    uses_tls: true
    tls_client_cert: "/path/to/client-cert.pem"
    tls_client_key: "/path/to/client-key.pem"
    tls_ca_cert: "/path/to/ca.pem"
    connect_timeout: 2
    server_subscription_key_only_subscribe_to_when_includes_any_of:
      - "search"
      - "create"
    server_subscription_key_do_not_subscribe_to_when_includes_any_of:
      - "old_search"
      - "old_create"
    subscription_key_replacements:
      - "original_service": "replacement_service"

This library is designed to be an alternative transport implementation used by the protobuf gem. In order to make protobuf use this library, you need to set the following env variable:

PB_SERVER_TYPE="protobuf/nats/runner"
PB_CLIENT_TYPE="protobuf/nats/client"

NOTE: For a more detailed example, look at the warehouse app in the examples directory of this project.

Here's a tl;dr example. You might have a protobuf definition and implementation like this:

require "protobuf/nats"

class User < ::Protobuf::Message
  optional :int64, :id, 1
  optional :string, :username, 2
end

class UserService < ::Protobuf::Rpc::Service
  rpc :create, User, User

  def create
    respond_with User.new(:id => 123, :username => request.username)
  end
end

Let's assume we saved this in a file called app.rb

We can now start an rpc server using the protobuf-nats runner and client:

$ export PB_SERVER_TYPE="protobuf/nats/runner"
$ export PB_CLIENT_TYPE="protobuf/nats/client"
$ bundle exec rpc_server start ./app.rb
...
I, [2017-03-24T12:16:02.539930 #12512]  INFO -- : Creating subscriptions:
I, [2017-03-24T12:16:02.543927 #12512]  INFO -- :   - rpc.user_service.create
...

And we can start a client and begin communicating:

$ export PB_SERVER_TYPE="protobuf/nats/runner"
$ export PB_CLIENT_TYPE="protobuf/nats/client"
$ bundle exec irb -r ./app
irb(main):001:0> UserService.client.create(User.new(:username => "testing 123"))
=> #<User id=123 username="testing 123">

And we can see the message was sent to the server and the server replied with a user which now has an id.

If we were to add another service endpoint called search to the UserService but fail to define an instance method search, then protobuf-nats will not subscribe to that route.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

The java-nats client is temporarily forked to support jruby > 9.2.10.0. The living branch for that is here: https://github.com/film42/java-nats/tree/jruby-compat. This will be removed when we upgrade to the new nats.java client.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/mxenabled/protobuf-nats.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.