Pub/Sub Messaging
Publish and subscribe to channels for event-driven communication. Build real-time features, microservices communication, and decoupled architectures using Pub/Sub.
Overview
Pub/Sub (Publish/Subscribe) messaging enables event-driven communication between different parts of your application or across microservices. The Store adapter provides a simple, type-safe interface for publishing messages to channels and subscribing to receive them. This pattern decouples components, making your application more scalable and maintainable.
Pub/Sub is particularly powerful for building real-time features, decoupling services, and implementing event-driven architectures. Messages are automatically serialized as JSON, making it easy to send complex data structures across your application without worrying about serialization details.
Pub/Sub is particularly powerful for building real-time features, decoupling services, and implementing event-driven architectures. Messages are automatically serialized as JSON.
Core Concepts
Understanding Pub/Sub concepts helps you use messaging effectively in your application. Channels, publishers, and subscribers work together to enable decoupled, event-driven communication between components. This architecture makes your application more flexible and easier to maintain.
Pub/Sub enables loose coupling between components—publishers don't need to know who's listening, and subscribers don't need to know who's publishing. This separation of concerns makes your codebase more maintainable and scalable.
Basic Usage
Getting started with Pub/Sub is straightforward—you publish messages to channels and subscribe to receive them. These operations form the foundation of event-driven communication in your application. Understanding basic usage helps you build more complex patterns later.
Pub/Sub operations are simple but powerful. Publishing messages is fast and non-blocking, while subscriptions process messages asynchronously, ensuring your application remains responsive even when handling many events.
Common Patterns
Pub/Sub messaging enables many powerful patterns for building event-driven applications. These patterns demonstrate common use cases like event broadcasting, real-time notifications, and cross-service communication. Understanding these patterns helps you apply Pub/Sub effectively in your own applications.
Each pattern solves a specific problem—event broadcasting decouples components, real-time notifications improve user experience, and cross-service communication enables microservices architectures. Choose the pattern that fits your use case.
Advanced Patterns
Advanced Pub/Sub patterns enable sophisticated event-driven architectures. These patterns solve complex problems like fan-out messaging, request-response communication, and message filtering. Understanding advanced patterns helps you build production-ready event-driven systems.
These patterns build on basic Pub/Sub operations to solve real-world challenges. They enable complex architectures while maintaining the decoupling benefits of Pub/Sub messaging.
Channel Naming Conventions
Use consistent naming patterns for channels to improve organization and maintainability. Good channel naming makes it easy to identify what messages a channel carries and how channels relate to each other. Follow consistent patterns across your application to make Pub/Sub code easier to understand.
Consistent naming conventions help developers understand channel purposes at a glance. Use hierarchical names to organize channels logically and make it easy to find related channels.
Error Handling
Subscriber errors shouldn't break your Pub/Sub system. Handle errors gracefully within subscribers to ensure one failing subscriber doesn't prevent others from processing messages. Good error handling keeps your event-driven system resilient and maintainable.
Error handling in Pub/Sub is critical because subscribers process messages asynchronously. Errors in one subscriber shouldn't affect others, and failed message processing should be logged and optionally retried.
Lifecycle Management
Proper lifecycle management ensures subscriptions are set up correctly during application startup and cleaned up gracefully during shutdown. This prevents resource leaks and ensures your Pub/Sub system starts and stops cleanly.
Lifecycle management is essential for production applications where subscriptions need to persist across application restarts and be cleaned up properly during shutdown. Understanding how to manage subscription lifecycle helps you build robust Pub/Sub systems.
Real-World Examples
These real-world examples demonstrate practical Pub/Sub patterns you can use in production applications. They show how to build activity feeds, implement cache invalidation, and handle multi-tenant scenarios using Pub/Sub messaging.
Real-world examples help you understand how Pub/Sub fits into actual applications. These patterns address common scenarios and provide production-ready solutions you can adapt for your own use cases.
Best Practices
Following Pub/Sub best practices ensures your event-driven system is maintainable, performant, and reliable. These practices cover channel naming, message structure, error handling, and performance optimization. Applying these practices helps you build production-ready Pub/Sub systems.
Good practices prevent common pitfalls like unclear channel names, unstructured messages, and performance bottlenecks. They make your Pub/Sub code easier to understand, debug, and maintain.
Troubleshooting
When Pub/Sub isn't working as expected, these troubleshooting tips help you identify and fix common issues. Most Pub/Sub problems stem from subscription setup, channel name mismatches, or connection issues. Understanding these common problems helps you debug Pub/Sub issues quickly.
Troubleshooting Pub/Sub requires checking subscription setup, verifying channel names match, and ensuring Redis connections are working correctly. These tips cover the most common issues developers encounter.