How to name Active Job Classes and Queues

TL;DR: Name your class after it’s arguments, and the queue by the class name.

Naming Active Jobs and Queues is tricky, it’s pretty easy to get yourself into a pickle of queue names that are vague & classes that are unclear.

Recently I was looking through the Rails Active Storage documentation, I noticed they had given the class ActiveStorage::AnalysisJob the queue active_storage_analysis. Looking a bit deeper I noticed they had followed this pattern in the other Active Storage job classes, and Action Mailbox Active Job classes.

I really liked this pattern, and started applying it to my rails projects. Here are the two strategies which led to much cleaner code.

Naming the Active Job class

Opening the app/jobs folder and seeing an unorganized mess is a little intimidating. I started using the first argument (most often a Active Record model), then what it’s doing as the second aspect of the name.

For example, if you have a job that took the User model and enriched the data you had on it, you’d end up with something like:

# In app/jobs/user/enrichment_job.rb
class User::EnrichmentJob < ApplicationJob
  queue_as :user

  def perform(user)
    # Do some magic.
  end
end

Naming the queues

It’s pretty tempting to dump everything into the default queue, but that can become problematic when quick running jobs get stuck waiting for a slower job to finish.

I use the approach of naming my queues based on the class name, using each namespace as a level of Granularity. For example:

# In app/jobs/user/enrichment_job.rb
class User::EnrichmentJob < ApplicationJob
  # Group them by the folder name
  queue_as :user

  # Be more specific if I want to run it in a dedicated worker.
  # queue_as :user_enrichment
end