pg-boss

Postgres job queue for Node

FreeAutomation & background jobsgithub.com

What it is

A Node.js job queue that uses Postgres SKIP LOCKED for concurrency instead of Redis. Provides cron-scheduled jobs, deferred and throttled jobs, retries with exponential backoff, job dependencies via completion callbacks, and automatic archiving and pruning of finished jobs.

Why it earns a slot

The zero-new-infrastructure option: if you have Postgres you already have a queue, and jobs can commit in the same transaction as your data, which kills the dual-write bug where the row saves but the job vanishes.

Know before you commit

Needs a long-running Node process, so it does not work on serverless. Throughput ceiling is your database: fine for thousands of jobs a minute, not hundreds of thousands.

Getting started

npm install pg-boss

Field notes

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Pricing snapshot

Free and MIT-licensed, no hosted tier and no per-job billing. Your only cost is whatever your Postgres instance already costs.

Snapshots move fast — verify at checkout, and post a field note if it changed.

Drop into your Lovable chat

Evaluate pg-boss (https://github.com/timgit/pg-boss) for this project, then use it only if it fits what we are already building.
Context: Postgres job queue for Node. A Node.js job queue that uses Postgres SKIP LOCKED for concurrency instead of Redis. Provides cron-scheduled jobs, deferred and throttled jobs, retries with exponential backoff, job dependencies via completion callbacks, and automatic archiving and pruning of finished jobs.
Reviewer notes (general, not written for this codebase): The zero-new-infrastructure option: if you have Postgres you already have a queue, and jobs can commit in the same transaction as your data, which kills the dual-write bug where the row saves but the job vanishes.
Watch out for: Needs a long-running Node process, so it does not work on serverless. Throughput ceiling is your database: fine for thousands of jobs a minute, not hundreds of thousands.
Pricing: Free and MIT-licensed, no hosted tier and no per-job billing. Your only cost is whatever your Postgres instance already costs.
Setup: npm install pg-boss
Rules: treat the notes above as background only. Do not assume a theme, style, layout or feature that is not already in this project — inspect the existing code first and ask me before changing visual direction.

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Neighbourhood

How pg-boss sits against the rest of the atlas — swaps, companions and the tools builders actually save alongside it.

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Named in the wiringDefer

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