Just launched: Sidequest.js, a background job processing for Node.js using your existing database.

#node #javascript #distributedsystems

Hey folks 👋

A while ago I built node-cron, a small library to schedule recurring tasks in Node.js. It got pretty popular (5M+ downloads/month), and I'm happy to see how widely it’s been adopted.

But over time, I noticed a recurring issue: people were running it inside production APIs (like Express apps), which led to some serious problems. Running background jobs inside Express apps can cause blocking I/O and make your API unresponsive.

Also, if your app is deployed across multiple instances, each one might run the same job, unless you set up a distributed locking mechanism manually.

To solve that, we created Sidequest.js, a background job runner for Node.js focused on simplicity, isolation, and zero lock-in.

It’s inspired by Oban (Elixir) and Sidekiq (Rails), but works with infrastructure most people already have. You can use PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or MongoDB as a backend, reusing the same database your app already relies on.

Jobs run in worker threads, isolated from your app’s main process. The system supports:

unique jobs
retries with exponential backoff
snoozing & priorities
concurrency control

Here’s how it looks in code:

import { Sidequest, Job } from "sidequest";

export class EmailJob extends Job {
  async run(to, subject) {
    console.log(`Sending email to ${to}: ${subject}`);
  }
}

// Enqueue
await Sidequest.build(EmailJob).enqueue("user@example.com", "Welcome!");

// Starting Sidequest
Sidequest.start({
  backend: {
    driver: "@sidequest/postgres-backend",
    config: "postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/my_database"
  }
});

There's also a dashboard to monitor everything:

If you’ve used BullMQ and want something that doesn’t depend solely on Redis, or if you’re tired of being locked into SQS or other cloud services — give Sidequest a try.

Just released the first stable version. I would love your feedback!