Work with workers

Workers are instances of your code that aren’t open to connections from other apps or services or the outside world. They’re good for handling background tasks. See how to configure a worker for your app.

Access the worker container

Like with any other application container, Upsun allows you to connect to the worker instance through SSH to inspect logs and interact with it.

Use the --worker switch in the Upsun CLI, like so:

upsun ssh --worker=queue

Stopping a worker

If a worker instance needs to be updated during a new deployment, a SIGTERM signal is first sent to the worker process to allow it to shut down gracefully. If your worker process can’t be interrupted mid-task, make sure it reacts to SIGTERM to pause its work gracefully.

If the process is still running after 15 seconds, a SIGKILL message is sent that force-terminates the worker process, allowing the container to be shut down and restarted.

To restart a worker manually, access the container and run the following commands:

sv stop app
sv start app

Workers vs cron jobs

Worker instances don’t run cron jobs. Instead, both worker instances and cron tasks address similar use cases. They both address out-of-band work that an application needs to do but that shouldn’t or can’t be done as part of a normal web request. They do so in different ways and so are fit for different use cases.

A cron job is well suited for tasks when:

• They need to happen on a fixed schedule, not continually.
• The task itself isn’t especially long, as a running cron job blocks a new deployment.
• It’s long but can be divided into many small queued tasks.
• A delay between when a task is registered and when it actually happens is acceptable.

A dedicated worker instance is a better fit if:

• Tasks should happen “now”, but not block a web request.
• Tasks are large enough that they risk blocking a deploy, even if they’re subdivided.
• The task in question is a continually running process rather than a stream of discrete units of work.

The appropriateness of one approach over the other also varies by language; single-threaded languages would benefit more from either cron or workers than a language with native multi-threading, for instance. If a given task seems like it would run equally well as a worker or as a cron, cron is generally more efficient as it doesn’t require its own container.

Commands

The commands key defines the command to launch the worker application. For now there is only a single command, start, but more will be added in the future. The commands.start property is required.

The start key specifies the command to use to launch your worker application. It may be any valid shell command, although most often it runs a command in your application in the language of your application. If the command specified by the start key terminates, it’s restarted automatically.

Note that deploy and post_deploy hooks as well as cron commands run only on the web container, not on workers.

Inheritance

Any top-level definitions for relationships, access, mount, and variables are inherited by every worker, unless overridden explicitly.

Likewise resources defined for the application container are inherited by every worker, unless overridden explicitly.

That means, for example, that the following two .upsun/config.yaml definitions produce identical workers.

applications:
    app: #The name of the app, which must be unique within the project.
        type: python:3.9
        mounts:
            test:
                source: storage
                source_path: test
        relationships:
            mysql:
        workers:
            queue:
                commands:
                    start: |
                        python queue-worker.py                        
            mail:
                commands:
                    start: |
                        python mail-worker.py                        
services:
    mysql:
        type: mariadb:11.4

applications:
    app: #The name of the app, which must be unique within the project.
        type: python:3.9
        workers:
            queue:
                commands:
                    start: |
                        python queue-worker.py                        
                mounts:
                    test:
                        source: storage
                        source_path: test
                mysql:
            mail:
                commands:
                    start: |
                        python mail-worker.py                        
                mounts:
                    test:
                        source: storage
                        source_path: test
                mysql:
services:
    mysql:
        type: mariadb:11.4

In both cases, there are two worker instances named queue and mail. Both have access to a MySQL/MariaDB service defined in .upsun/config.yaml, through a relationship that is identical to the name of that service (mysql). Both also have their own separate storage mount.

Customizing a worker

The most common properties to set in a worker to override the top-level settings are variables and its resources. variables lets you instruct the application to run differently as a worker than as a web site, whereas you can allocate fewer worker-specific resources for a container that is running only a single background process (unlike the web site which is handling many requests at once).

For example, consider the following configuration:

applications:
    app: #The name of the app, which must be unique within the project.
        type: "python:3.9"
        hooks:
            build: |
            pip install -r requirements.txt
            pip install -e .
            pip install gunicorn            
        relationships:
            mysql:
            rabbitmq:
        variables:
            env:
                type: 'none'
        web:
            commands:
                start: "gunicorn -b $PORT project.wsgi:application"
            variables:
                env:
                    type: 'web'
            mounts:
                uploads:
                    source: storage
                    source_path: uploads
            locations:
                "/":
                    root: ""
                    passthru: true
                    allow: false
                "/static":
                    root: "static/"
                    allow: true
        workers:
            queue:
                commands:
                    start: |
                        python queue-worker.py                        
                variables:
                    env:
                        type: 'worker'
                mounts:
                    scratch:
                        source: storage
                        source_path: scratch
            mail:
                commands:
                    start: |
                        python mail-worker.py                        
                variables:
                    env:
                        type: 'worker'
                mounts: {}
                relationships:
                    rabbitmq:
services:
    mysql:
        type: 'mariadb:11.4'
    rabbitmq:
        type: 'rabbitmq:3.13'

There’s a lot going on here, but it’s all reasonably straightforward. The configuration in .upsun/config.yaml takes a single Python 3.9 code base from your repository, downloads all dependencies in requirements.txt, and then installs Gunicorn. That artifact (your code plus the downloaded dependencies) is deployed as three separate container instances, all running Python 3.9.

The web instance starts a Gunicorn process to serve a web application.

• It runs the Gunicorn process to serve web requests, defined by the project/wsgi.py file which contains an application definition.
• It has an environment variable named TYPE with value web.
• It has a writable mount at /app/uploads.
• It has access to both a MySQL database and a RabbitMQ server, both of which are defined in .upsun/config.yaml.

The queue instance is a worker that isn’t web-accessible.

• It runs the queue-worker.py script, and restart it automatically if it ever terminates.
• It has an environment variable named TYPE with value worker.
• It has a writable mount at /app/scratch.
• It has access to both a MySQL database and a RabbitMQ server, both of which are defined in .upsun/config.yaml (because it doesn’t specify otherwise).

The mail instance is a worker that isn’t web-accessible.

• It runs the mail-worker.py script, and restart it automatically if it ever terminates.
• It has an environment variable named TYPE with value worker.
• It has no writable file mounts at all.
• It has access only to the RabbitMQ server, through a different relationship name than on the web instance. It has no access to MySQL.

For example, if you want the web instance to have a large upload space and the queue instance to have a small amount of scratch space for temporary files, you can allocate more CPU and RAM to the web instance than to the queue instance.

The mail instance has no persistent writable disk space at all, as it doesn’t need it. The mail instance also doesn’t need any access to the SQL database, so for security reasons it has none.

Each instance can also check the TYPE environment variable to detect how it’s running and, if appropriate, adjust its behavior accordingly.

Mounts

When defining a worker instance, keep in mind what mount behavior you want.

tmp and instance local mounts are a separate storage area for each instance, while storage mounts can be shared between instances.

For example, you can define a storage mount (called shared_dir) to be used by a web instance, and a tmp mount (called local_dir) to be used by a queue worker instance:

applications:
    app: #The name of the app, which must be unique within the project.
        type: "nodejs:22"

        # Define a web instance
        web:
            locations:
                "/":
                    root: "public"
                    passthru: true
                    index: ['index.html']

        mounts:
            # Define a storage mount that's available to both instances together
            'shared_dir':
                source: storage
                service: files
                source_path: our_stuff

            # Define a local mount that's available to each instance separately
            'local_dir':
                source: tmp
                source_path: my_stuff

        # Define a worker instance from the same code but with a different start
        workers:
            queue:
                commands:
                    start: ./start.sh

Both the web instance and queue worker have their own, dedicated local_dir mount. Note that:

• Each local_dir mount is a tmp mount with a maximum allocation of 8 GB.
  
• tmp mounts may be removed during infrastructure maintenance operations.

Both the web instance and queue worker also have a shared_dir mount pointing to the same network storage space. They can both read and write to it simultaneously.