Workers and Routing Keys

Routing Keys

When creating a worker you need to define a routing key alias, which is used within the routing key upon sending / receiving messages to / form RabbitMQ. This can be anything you want, and the resulting routing key to call a method within the worker will be PACKAGE.ROUTING_KEY_ALIAS.METHOD.

For example, a worker was created with ./apex create worker users:user users.profile, meaning the PHP class file created is located at /src/users/worker/user.php. When any messages are sent to RabbitMQ with the routing key users.profile.*, this PHP class will be loaded, and the method name of the third segment of the routing key will be executed.

For example, upon creating a new user, a message is sent via RabbitMQ to users.profile.create, which loads this worker class and executes the create() method within it.

Worker Daemon

If you're either running Apex on a single server, or this is a back-end application server, you need to run the Apex daemon. There is a bash script located at /src/apex, which is the init script for all Apex processes -- one-way messaging, two-way RPC calls, and the WebSocket server. Copy it over to the /etc/init.d/ directory of your server, CHMOD it to 0755, and with a non-root sudo user execute it to start the Apex servers. This is required in order for the messages sent to RabbitMQ to be relayed properly to the back-end application server(s), even if everything is running on the same server.

For example, change to the installation directory of Apex, and type:

sudo cp src/apex /etc/init.d/
sudo chmod 0755 /etc/init.d/apex
sudo /etc/init.d/apex start