Graceful shutdown

BullMQ supports graceful shutdowns of workers. This is important so that we can minimize stalled jobs when a worker for some reason must be shutdown. But note that even in the event of a "ungraceful shutdown", the stalled mechanism in BullMQ allows for new workers to pick up stalled jobs and continue working on them.

DANGER

Prior to BullMQ 2.0, in order for stalled jobs to be picked up by other workers you need to have a QueueScheduler class running in the system.

From BullMQ 2.0 and onwards, the QueueScheduler is not needed anymore, so the information above is only valid for older versions.

In order to perform a shutdown just call the close method:

TypeScript

await worker.close();

Python

await worker.close()

Elixir

:ok = BullMQ.Worker.close(worker)

.NET

await worker.CloseAsync();

Rust

worker.close(30_000).await?;

The shutdown behavior and timeout depend on the SDK. TypeScript, Python, and .NET wait for active jobs to finish without a built-in timeout. Rust's close(30_000) waits for up to 30 seconds and aborts unfinished processing when the deadline expires. Elixir waits up to 30 seconds by default; pass timeout: milliseconds to choose another deadline, or force: true to skip waiting. If shutdown ends before active jobs finish, they can be recovered as stalled by other workers (when stalled-job checking is configured).