Publish/Subscribe

Publish/Subscribe

Lettuce provides support for Publish/Subscribe on Redis Standalone and Redis Cluster connections. The connection is notified on message/subscribed/unsubscribed events after subscribing to channels or patterns. Synchronous, asynchronous and reactive APIs are provided to interact with Redis Publish/Subscribe features.

Subscribing

A connection can notify multiple listeners that implement RedisPubSubListener (Lettuce provides a RedisPubSubAdapter for convenience). All listener registrations are kept within the StatefulRedisPubSubConnection/StatefulRedisClusterConnection.

StatefulRedisPubSubConnection<String, String> connection = client.connectPubSub()
connection.addListener(new RedisPubSubListener<String, String>() { ... })

RedisPubSubCommands<String, String> sync = connection.sync();
sync.subscribe("channel");

// application flow continues

Note

Don’t issue blocking calls (includes synchronous API calls to Lettuce) from inside of Pub/Sub callbacks as this would block the EventLoop. If you need to fetch data from Redis from inside a callback, please use the asynchronous API.

StatefulRedisPubSubConnection<String, String> connection = client.connectPubSub()
connection.addListener(new RedisPubSubListener<String, String>() { ... })

RedisPubSubAsyncCommands<String, String> async = connection.async();
RedisFuture<Void> future = async.subscribe("channel");

// application flow continues

Reactive API

The reactive API provides hot Observables to listen on ChannelMessages and PatternMessages. The Observables receive all inbound messages. You can do filtering using the observable chain if you need to filter out the interesting ones, The Observable stops triggering events when the subscriber unsubscribes from it.

StatefulRedisPubSubConnection<String, String> connection = client.connectPubSub()

RedisPubSubReactiveCommands<String, String> reactive = connection.reactive();
reactive.subscribe("channel").subscribe();

reactive.observeChannels().doOnNext(patternMessage -> {...}).subscribe()

// application flow continues

Redis Cluster

Redis Cluster support Publish/Subscribe but requires some attention in general. User-space Pub/Sub messages (Calling PUBLISH) are broadcasted across the whole cluster regardless of subscriptions to particular channels/patterns. This behavior allows connecting to an arbitrary cluster node and registering a subscription. The client isn’t required to connect to the node where messages were published.

A cluster-aware Pub/Sub connection is provided by RedisClusterClient.connectPubSub() allowing to listen for cluster reconfiguration and reconnect if the topology changes.

StatefulRedisClusterPubSubConnection<String, String> connection = clusterClient.connectPubSub()
connection.addListener(new RedisPubSubListener<String, String>() { ... })

RedisPubSubCommands<String, String> sync = connection.sync();
sync.subscribe("channel");

Redis Cluster also makes a distinction between user-space and key-space messages. Key-space notifications (Pub/Sub messages for key-activity) stay node-local and are not broadcasted across the Redis Cluster. A notification about, e.g. an expiring key, stays local to the node on which the key expired.

Clients that are interested in keyspace notifications must subscribe to the appropriate node (or nodes) to receive these notifications. You can either use RedisClient.connectPubSub() to establish Pub/Sub connections to the individual nodes or use RedisClusterClient's message propagation and NodeSelection API to get a managed set of connections.

StatefulRedisClusterPubSubConnection<String, String> connection = clusterClient.connectPubSub()
connection.addListener(new RedisClusterPubSubListener<String, String>() { ... })
connection.setNodeMessagePropagation(true);

RedisPubSubCommands<String, String> sync = connection.sync();
sync.masters().commands().subscribe("__keyspace@0__:*");

There are two things to pay special attention to:

1. Replication: Keys replicated to replica nodes, especially considering expiry, generate keyspace events on all nodes holding the key. If a key expires and it is replicated, it will expire on the master and all replicas. Each Redis server will emit keyspace events. Subscribing to non-master nodes, therefore, will let your application see multiple events of the same type for the same key because of Redis distributed nature.

2. Topology Changes: Subscriptions are issued either by using the NodeSelection API or by calling subscribe(…) on the individual cluster node connections. Subscription registrations are not propagated to new nodes that are added on a topology change.