Proletarian is a battle-tested background job library for Clojure applications. It uses your existing PostgreSQL or MySQL database as the job queue, giving you durable, transactional job processing without introducing new infrastructure. Jobs survive application restarts, and transactional enqueueing lets you atomically commit business logic alongside job creation.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/msolli/proletarian/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Installation
Add Proletarian to your deps.edn or project.clj and set up the database tables.
Quickstart
Create your first queue worker and enqueue a job in minutes.
Core Concepts
Understand queue workers, job handlers, and at-least-once processing.
API Reference
Full reference for enqueue!, create-queue-worker, and all public functions.
Why Proletarian?
Most background job systems require you to run a separate message broker (Redis, RabbitMQ, etc.). If you’re already on PostgreSQL or MySQL, Proletarian lets you skip that extra dependency entirely — your job queue lives right alongside your application data.Transactional Enqueueing
Enqueue jobs inside a database transaction alongside your business logic writes. Either both succeed or both roll back — no orphaned jobs, no missed notifications.
At-Least-Once Delivery
Jobs are never removed from the queue until they complete successfully. Workers use
SELECT ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED for safe concurrent processing.Configurable Retries
Define per-job retry counts and delays. Inspect the exception to make smart retry decisions, such as reading
Retry-After headers from external APIs.Multiple Queues
Create multiple named queues with independent thread pools and polling intervals to prioritize different workloads.
Get Started in Three Steps
Create the database tables
Run the provided SQL migration for PostgreSQL or MySQL to create the
proletarian.job and proletarian.archived_job tables.Explore the Docs
Database Setup
PostgreSQL and MySQL table definitions and installation scripts.
Retries & Failures
Configure retry strategies and handle permanently failed jobs.
Graceful Shutdown
Handle JVM shutdown hooks and thread interrupts correctly.
Logging
Integrate Proletarian’s event log with your application’s logger.
Scheduled Jobs
Delay job execution with process-at and process-in options.
Examples
Runnable examples covering basics, retries, and shutdown handling.