Graceful Shutdown

Rabbit Relay supports graceful shutdown through broker.close().

This is important for tests, Docker, Kubernetes, and production deploys.

Basic usage

const broker = new RabbitMQBroker("orders-service");

process.on("SIGTERM", async () => {
  await broker.close();
  process.exit(0);
});

What close does

broker.close() attempts to:

• stop active consumers
• cancel consumer subscriptions
• wait for active handlers to finish, up to shutdownTimeoutMs
• requeue deliveries that were pending locally but had not started
• stop reconnect attempts
• close the normal channel
• close the confirm channel
• close the RabbitMQ connection

Why it matters

Graceful shutdown helps prevent:

• hanging Node.js processes
• abandoned consumers
• duplicate work during deploys
• test processes that never exit

Kubernetes example

process.on("SIGTERM", async () => {
  console.log("Stopping RabbitMQ broker...");
  await broker.close();
  console.log("RabbitMQ broker stopped");
  process.exit(0);
});

Drain timeout

The default drain timeout is 30 seconds. Configure it per broker:

const broker = new RabbitMQBroker("orders-service", {
  shutdownTimeoutMs: 15_000,
});

Each broker owns its RabbitMQ connection and channels. Closing one broker does not close other brokers in the same process.

Summary

• Use broker.close() during shutdown
• Handles consumers, channels, and connection cleanup
• Drains active handlers with a bounded timeout
• Broker instances have isolated connection lifecycles
• Useful for tests and production services
• Safe to call during process termination