Pull consumers

A pull-based consumer allows you to pull from a queue over HTTP from any environment and/or programming language outside of Cloudflare Workers. A pull-based consumer can be useful when your message consumption rate is limited by upstream infrastructure or long-running tasks.

​​ How to choose between push or pull consumer

Deciding whether to configure a push-based consumer or a pull-based consumer will depend on how you are using your queues, as well as the configuration of infrastructure upstream from your queue consumer.

• Starting with a push-based consumer is the easiest way to get started and consume from a queue. A push-based consumer runs on Workers, and by default, will automatically scale up and consume messages as they are written to the queue.
• Use a pull-based consumer if you need to consume messages from existing infrastucture outside of Cloudflare Workers, and/or where you need to carefully control how fast messages are consumed. A pull-based consumer must explicitly make a call to pull (and then acknowledge) messages from the queue, only when it is ready to do so.

You can remove and attach a new consumer on a queue at any time, allowing you to change from a pull-based to a push-based consumer if your requirements change.

Configuration

To configure a pull-based consumer and receive messages from a queue, you need to:

1. Enable HTTP pull for the queue.
2. Create a valid authentication token for the HTTP client.
3. Pull message batches from the queue.
4. Acknowledge and/or retry messages within a batch.

​​ 1. Enable HTTP pull

You can enable HTTP pull or change a queue from push-based to pull-based via wrangler.toml, the wrangler CLI, or via the Cloudflare dashboard Open external link .

​​ wrangler.toml

A HTTP consumer can be configured in wrangler.toml by setting type = "http_pull" in the consumer configuration:

[[queues.consumer]]
# Required
queue = "QUEUE_NAME"
type = "http_pull"
# Optional
visibility_timeout_ms = 5000
max_retries = 5
dead_letter_queue = "SOME_OTHER_QUEUE"

Omitting the type property will default the queue to push-based.

​​ wrangler CLI

You can enable a pull-based consumer on any existing queue by using the wrangler queues consumer http sub-commands and providing a queue name.

$ npx wrangler queues consumer http add $QUEUE_NAME

If you have an existing push-based consumer, you will need to remove that first. wrangler will return an error if you attempt to call consumer http add on a queue with an existing consumer configuration:

$ wrangler queues consumer worker remove $QUEUE_NAME $SCRIPT_NAME

​​ 2. Consumer authentication

HTTP Pull consumers require an API token with the com.cloudflare.api.account.queues_read and com.cloudflare.api.account.queues_write permissions.

Both read and write are required as a pull-based consumer needs to write to the queue state to acknowledge the messages it receives. Consuming messages mutates the queue.

API tokens are presented as Bearer tokens in the Authorization header of a HTTP request in the format Authorization: Bearer $YOUR_TOKEN_HERE. The following example shows how to pass an API token using the curl HTTP client:

$ curl "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/${CF_ACCOUNT_ID}/queues/${QUEUE_ID}/messages/pull" \
  --data '{ "visibility_timeout": 10000, "batch_size": 2 }' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${QUEUES_TOKEN}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json"

You may authenticate and run multiple concurrent pull-based consumers against a single queue, noting that all consumers will share the same rate limit against the Cloudflare API.

​​ Create API tokens

To create an API token:

1. Go to the API tokens page of the Cloudflare dashboard Open external link .
2. Select Create Token.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Create Custom Token.
4. Give the token a name. For example, queue-pull-token.
5. Under the Permissions section, choose Account and then Queues. Ensure you have selected Edit (read+write).
6. (Optional) Select All accounts (default) or a specific account to scope the token to.
7. Select Continue to summary and then Create token.

You will need to note the token down: it will only be displayed once.

​​ 3. Pull messages

To pull a message, make a HTTP POST request to the Queues REST API Open API docs link with a JSON-encoded body that optionally specifies a visibility_timeout and a batch_size, or an empty JSON object ({}):

// POST /accounts/${CF_ACCOUNT_ID}/queues/${QUEUE_ID}/messages/pull with the timeout & batch size
let resp = await fetch(
  `https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/${CF_ACCOUNT_ID}/queues/${QUEUE_ID}/messages/pull`,
  {
    method: "POST",
    headers: {
      "content-type": "application/json",
      authorization: `Bearer ${QUEUES_API_TOKEN}`,
    },
    // Optional - you can provide an empty object '{}' and the defaults will apply.
    body: JSON.stringify({ visibility_timeout: 6000, batch_size: 50 }),
  }
);

This will return an array of messages (up to the specified batch_size) in the below format:

{
  "success": true,
  "errors": [],
  "messages": [],
  "result": {
    "messages": [
      {
        "body": "hello",
        "id": "1ad27d24c83de78953da635dc2ea208f",
        "timestamp_ms": 1689615013586,
        "attempts": 2,
        "lease_id": "eyJhbGciOiJkaXIiLCJlbmMiOiJBMjU2Q0JDLUhTNTEyIn0..NXmbr8h6tnKLsxJ_AuexHQ.cDt8oBb_XTSoKUkVKRD_Jshz3PFXGIyu7H1psTO5UwI.smxSvQ8Ue3-ymfkV6cHp5Va7cyUFPIHuxFJA07i17sc"
      },
      {
        "body": "world",
        "id": "95494c37bb89ba8987af80b5966b71a7",
        "timestamp_ms": 1689615013586,
        "attempts": 2,
        "lease_id": "eyJhbGciOiJkaXIiLCJlbmMiOiJBMjU2Q0JDLUhTNTEyIn0..QXPgHfzETsxYQ1Vd-H0hNA.mFALS3lyouNtgJmGSkTzEo_imlur95EkSiH7fIRIn2U.PlwBk14CY_EWtzYB-_5CR1k30bGuPFPUx1Nk5WIipFU"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Pull consumers follow a “short polling” approach: if there are messages available to be delivered, Queues will return a response immediately with messages up to the configured batch_size. If there are no messages to deliver, Queues will return an empty response. Queues does not hold an open connection (often referred to as “long polling”) if there are no messages to deliver.

Each message object has five fields:

1. body - this may be base64 encoded based on the content-type the message was published as.
2. id - a unique, read-only ephemeral identifier for the message.
3. timestamp_ms - when the message was published to the queue in milliseconds since the Unix epoch Open external link . This allows you to determine how old a message is by subtracting it from the current timestamp.
4. attempts - how many times the message has been attempted to be delivered in full. When this reaches the value of max_retries, the message will not be re-delivered and will be deleted from the queue permanently.
5. lease_id - the encoded lease ID of the message. The lease_id is used to explicitly acknowledge or retry the message.

The lease_id allows your pull consumer to explicitly acknowledge some, none or all messages in the batch or mark them for retry. If messages are not acknowledged or marked for retry by the consumer, then they will be marked for re-delivery once the visibility_timeout is reached. A lease_id is no longer valid once this timeout has been reached.

You can configure both batch_size and visibility_timeout when pulling from a queue:

• batch_size (defaults to 5; max 100) - how many messages are returned to the consumer in each pull.
• visibility_timeout (defaults to 30 second; max 12 hours) - defines how long the consumer has to explicitly acknowledge messages delivered in the batch based on their lease_id. Once this timeout expires, messages are assumed unacknowledged and queued for re-delivery again.

​​ Concurrent consumers

You may have multiple HTTP clients pulling from the same queue concurrently: each client will receive a unique batch of messages and retain the “lease” on those messages up until the visibility_timeout expires, or until those messages are marked for retry.

Messages marked for retry will be put back into the queue and can be delivered to any consumer. Messages are not tied to a specific consumer, as consumers do not have an identity and to avoid a slow or stuck consumer from holding up processing of messages in a queue.

Multiple consumers can be useful in cases where you have multiple upstream resources (for example, GPU infrastructure), where you want to autoscale based on the backlog of a queue, and/or cost.

​​ 4. Acknowledge messages

Messages pulled by a consumer need to be either acknowledged or marked for retry.

To acknowledge and/or mark messages to be retried, make a HTTP POST request to /ack endpoint of your queue per the Queues REST API Open API docs link by providing an array of lease_id objects to acknowledge and/or retry:

// POST /accounts/${CF_ACCOUNT_ID}/queues/${QUEUE_ID}/messages/ack with the lease_ids
let resp = await fetch(
  `https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/${CF_ACCOUNT_ID}/queues/${QUEUE_ID}/messages/ack`,
  {
    method: "POST",
    headers: {
      "content-type": "application/json",
      authorization: `Bearer ${QUEUES_API_TOKEN}`,
    },
    // If you have no messages to retry, you can specify an empty array - retries: []
    body: JSON.stringify({ acks: [{ lease_id: "lease_id1" }, { lease_id: "lease_id2" }, { lease_id: "etc" }], retries: [{ lease_id: "lease_id4" }]}),
  }
);

You may optionally specify the number of seconds to delay a message for when marking it for retry by providing a { lease_id: string, delay_seconds: number } object in the retries array:

{
  acks: [{ lease_id: "lease_id1" }, { lease_id: "lease_id2" }, { lease_id: "lease_id3" }],
  retries: [{ lease_id: "lease_id4", delay_seconds: 600}]
}

Additionally:

• You should provide every lease_id in the request to the /ack endpoint if you are processing those messages in your consumer. If you do not acknowledge a message, it will be marked for re-delivery (put back in the queue).
• You can optionally mark messages to be retried: for example, if there is an error processing the message or you have upstream resource pressure. Explicitly marking a message for retry will place it back into the queue immediately, instead of waiting for a (potentially long) visibility_timeout to be reached.
• You can make multiple calls to the /ack endpoint as you make progress through a batch of messages, but we recommend grouping acknowledgements to avoid hitting API rate limits.

Queues aims to be permissive when it comes to lease IDs: if a consumer acknowledges a message by its lease ID after the visibility timeout is reached, Queues will still accept that acknowledgment. If the message was delivered to another consumer during the intervening period, it will also be able to acknowledge the message without an error.

​​ Content types

When publishing to a queue that has an external consumer, you should be aware that certain content types may be encoded in a way that allows them to be safely serialized within a JSON object.

For both the json and bytes content types, this means that they will be base64-encoded ( RFC 4648 Open external link ). The text type will be sent as a plain UTF-8 encoded string.

Your consumer will need to decode the json and bytes types before operating on the data.

​​ Next steps

• Review the REST API documentation Open API docs link and schema for Queues.
• Learn more about how to make API calls to the Cloudflare API.
• Understand what limit apply when consuming and writing to a queue.