How to work around amqplib's Channel#consume odd signature? - node.js

Question

I am writing a worker that uses amqplib's Channel#consume method. I want this worker to wait for jobs and process them as soon as they appear in the queue.
I wrote my own module to abstract away ampqlib, here are the relevant functions for getting a connection, setting up the queue and consuming a message:
const getConnection = function(host) {
return amqp.connect(host);
};
const createChannel = function(conn) {
connection = conn;
return conn.createConfirmChannel();
};
const assertQueue = function(channel, queue) {
return channel.assertQueue(queue);
};
const consume = Promise.method(function(channel, queue, processor) {
processor = processor || function(msg) { if (msg) Promise.resolve(msg); };
return channel.consume(queue, processor)
});
const setupQueue = Promise.method(function setupQueue(queue) {
const amqp_host = 'amqp://' + ((host || process.env.AMQP_HOST) || 'localhost');
return getConnection(amqp_host)
.then(conn => createChannel(conn)) // -> returns a `Channel` object
.tap(channel => assertQueue(channel, queue));
});
consumeJob: Promise.method(function consumeJob(queue) {
return setupQueue(queue)
.then(channel => consume(channel, queue))
});
My problem is with Channel#consume's odd signature. From http://www.squaremobius.net/amqp.node/channel_api.html#channel_consume:
#consume(queue, function(msg) {...}, [options, [function(err, ok) {...}]])
The callback is not where the magic happens, the message's processing should actually go in the second argument and that breaks the flow of promises.
This is how I planned on using it:
return queueManager.consumeJob(queue)
.then(msg => {
// do some processing
});
But it doesn't work. If there are no messages in the queue, the promise is rejected and then if a message is dropped in the queue nothing happens. If there is a message, only one message is processed and then the worker stalls because it exited the "processor" function from the Channel#consume call.
How should I go about it? I want to keep the queueManager abstraction so my code is easier to reason about but I don't know how to do it... Any pointers?

Answer 1

As #idbehold said, Promises can only be resolved once. If you want to process messages as they come in, there is no other way than to use this function. Channel#get will only check the queue once and then return; it wouldn't work for a scenario where you need a worker.

Answer 2

just as an option. You can present your application as a stream of some messages(or events). There is a library for this http://highlandjs.org/#examples
Your code should look like this(it isn`t a finished sample, but I hope it illustrates the idea):
let messageStream = _((push, next) => {
consume(queue, (msg) => {
push(null, msg)
})
)
// now you can operate with your stream in functional style
message.map((msg) => msg + 'some value').each((msg) => // do something with msg)
This approach provides you a lot of primitives for synchronization and transformation
http://highlandjs.org/#examples