NATS Logo by Example

Core Publish-Subcribe in Messaging

This example demonstrates the core NATS publish-subscribe behavior. This is the fundamental pattern that all other NATS patterns and higher-level APIs build upon. There are a few takeaways from this example:

  • Delivery is an at-most-once. For MQTT users, this is referred to as Quality of Service (QoS) 0.
  • There are two circumstances when a published message won’t be delivered to a subscriber:
    • The subscriber does not have an active connection to the server (i.e. the client is temporarily offline for some reason)
    • There is a network interruption where the message is ultimately dropped
  • Messages are published to subjects which can be one or more concrete tokens, e.g. greet.bob. Subscribers can utilize wildcards to show interest on a set of matching subjects.
CLI Go Python Deno Node Rust C# Java Ruby Elixir C
Jump to the output or the recording
$ nbe run messaging/pub-sub/go
View the source code or learn how to run this example yourself

Code

package main


import (
	"fmt"
	"os"
	"time"


	"github.com/nats-io/nats.go"
)


func main() {

Use the env varibale if running in the container, otherwise use the default.

	url := os.Getenv("NATS_URL")
	if url == "" {
		url = nats.DefaultURL
	}

Create an unauthenticated connection to NATS.

	nc, _ := nats.Connect(url)

Drain is a safe way to to ensure all buffered messages that were published are sent and all buffered messages received on a subscription are processed being closing the connection.

	defer nc.Drain()

Messages are published to subjects. Although there are no subscribers, this will be published successfully.

	nc.Publish("greet.joe", []byte("hello"))

Let’s create a subscription on the greet.* wildcard.

	sub, _ := nc.SubscribeSync("greet.*")

For a synchronous subscription, we need to fetch the next message. However.. since the publish occured before the subscription was established, this is going to timeout.

	msg, _ := sub.NextMsg(10 * time.Millisecond)
	fmt.Println("subscribed after a publish...")
	fmt.Printf("msg is nil? %v\n", msg == nil)

Publish a couple messages.

	nc.Publish("greet.joe", []byte("hello"))
	nc.Publish("greet.pam", []byte("hello"))

Since the subscription is established, the published messages will immediately be broadcasted to all subscriptions. They will land in their buffer for subsequent NextMsg calls.

	msg, _ = sub.NextMsg(10 * time.Millisecond)
	fmt.Printf("msg data: %q on subject %q\n", string(msg.Data), msg.Subject)


	msg, _ = sub.NextMsg(10 * time.Millisecond)
	fmt.Printf("msg data: %q on subject %q\n", string(msg.Data), msg.Subject)

One more for good measures..

	nc.Publish("greet.bob", []byte("hello"))


	msg, _ = sub.NextMsg(10 * time.Millisecond)
	fmt.Printf("msg data: %q on subject %q\n", string(msg.Data), msg.Subject)
}

Output

Network 6b32c814_default  Creating
Network 6b32c814_default  Created
Container 6b32c814-nats-1  Creating
Container 6b32c814-nats-1  Created
Container 6b32c814-nats-1  Starting
Container 6b32c814-nats-1  Started
subscribed after a publish...
msg is nil? true
msg data: "hello" on subject "greet.joe"
msg data: "hello" on subject "greet.pam"
msg data: "hello" on subject "greet.bob"

Recording

Note, playback is half speed to make it a bit easier to follow.