Events

Each pg-boss instance is an EventEmitter, and contains the following events.

error

The error event could be raised during internal processing, such as scheduling and maintenance. Adding a listener to the error event is strongly encouraged because of the default behavior of Node.

If an EventEmitter does not have at least one listener registered for the 'error' event, and an 'error' event is emitted, the error is thrown, a stack trace is printed, and the Node.js process exits.

Source: Node.js Events > Error Events

Ideally, code similar to the following example would be used after creating your instance, but before start() is called.

boss.on('error', error => logger.error(error));

warning

During monitoring and maintenance, pg-boss may raise warning events. The payload contains message and data properties with details about the warning.

boss.on('warning', ({ message, data }) => {
  console.log('pg-boss warning:', message, data);
});

Warning Types

Type	Description	Data Properties
slow_query	A maintenance query exceeded the slow query threshold	elapsed (seconds)
queue_backlog	A queue has exceeded its warning threshold	name, queuedCount, warningQueued
clock_skew	Database clock is out of sync with application server	seconds, direction

Warning Persistence

Warnings are emitted as events by default. To also persist warnings to the database for historical tracking, enable the persistWarnings option:

const boss = new PgBoss({
  connectionString: 'postgres://...',
  persistWarnings: true
});

When enabled, warnings are stored in the warning table and can be queried directly or viewed in the pg-boss dashboard. See SQL for the table schema.

To automatically prune old warnings, set the warningRetentionDays option:

const boss = new PgBoss({
  connectionString: 'postgres://...',
  persistWarnings: true,
  warningRetentionDays: 30  // Auto-delete warnings older than 30 days
});

wip

Emitted at most once every 2 seconds whenever at least one worker has an active job. The payload is an array that represents each worker in this instance of pg-boss.

[
  {
    id: 'fc738fb0-1de5-4947-b138-40d6a790749e',
    workId: 'a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-1234567890ab',
    name: 'my-queue',
    options: { pollingInterval: 2000 },
    state: 'active',
    count: 1,
    createdOn: 1620149137015,
    lastFetchedOn: 1620149137015,
    lastJobStartedOn: 1620149137015,
    lastJobEndedOn: null,
    lastJobDuration: 343
    lastError: null,
    lastErrorOn: null
  }
]

workId is the value returned by work(). When using localConcurrency, multiple worker entries in the array will share the same workId, allowing you to correlate them back to a specific work() call.

const workId = await boss.work('my-queue', { localConcurrency: 5 }, handler)

boss.on('wip', workers => {
  const myWorkers = workers.filter(w => w.workId === workId)
  const working = myWorkers.filter(w => w.count > 0).length
  const idle = myWorkers.length - working
  console.log(`working: ${working}/${myWorkers.length}, idle: ${idle}`)
})

stopped

Emitted after stop() once all workers have completed their work and maintenance has been shut down.

bam

Emitted when a boss async migration (BAM) command changes status. BAM commands are database operations that run asynchronously after schema migrations, such as creating indexes on partitioned tables.

boss.on('bam', event => {
  console.log(`BAM ${event.name}: ${event.status}`)
})

The event payload contains:

{
  id: '550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000',
  name: 'create-index',
  status: 'completed',  // 'in_progress', 'completed', or 'failed'
  queue: 'my-queue',    // queue name if applicable
  table: 'j1a2b3c4...', // target table name
  error: undefined      // error message if status is 'failed'
}

This event is useful for monitoring migration progress in production environments or for logging purposes.