Core Publish-Subscribe (Go)

Core Publish-Subscribe 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.

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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 variable 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 ensure all buffered messages that were published are sent and all buffered messages received on a subscription are processed before 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

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.