Using Tags with Sidekiq Jobs

2021-06-23

A customer recently opened issue to point out a bug in Sidekiq’s tag filtering support and I realized: I haven’t told people that tags exist. Oops. Here is your notification. 😁

Sidekiq 6.0.1 added support for per-job tags. Tags are an Array of Strings within the job payload. Maybe you want to tag the sports related to a given job:

class SomeWorker
  include Sidekiq::Worker
  sidekiq_options tags: ['alpha']

There’s plenty of ideas for job tagging:

active locale or user language
customer or account ID
a ‘manual’ tag indicating jobs created using Rails console

In the Web UI you can see tags and, in Sidekiq Pro, click on them to see all jobs with that tag.

For example, assume we have a bunch of jobs which are associated with different sports. First we’ll create a bunch of jobs with random tags:

sports = [:⚽️, :🏈, :⛳️, :⚾️, :🏀, :🎾, :🏐, :🥊, :🎳, :🏓]
100.times do
  SimpleWorker.set(tags: sports.sample(2)).perform_async("abc")
end

In Redis, tags are an Array within each job’s JSON payload.

{
  "class": "SimpleWorker",
  "args": ["abc"],
  "tags": ["⚽️", "🏈"],
  "queue": "default"
}

On the Retries and Dead tabs, we can see each tag formatted as a blue label next to the job type.

alljobs

In Sidekiq Pro, the tags are clickable and will use Pro’s filtering support to show just jobs with that tag. Click a soccer ball and you’ll see all jobs tagged with it. The filter isn’t very smart; it looks for any substring match within the job’s JSON payload – make your tags unique or you can get false positives. That’s why I like to use emoji: they are unusual but short and easy to read.

alljobs

Tags can make sets of jobs easier to find and manage within Redis. Have a creative use for tags? Have an idea to improve them? Open a issue and let me know.