Stop retrying jobs

When a processor throws an exception that is considered unrecoverable, you should use the UnrecoverableError class. In this case, BullMQ will just move the job to the failed set without performing any retries, overriding any attempts settings used when adding the job to the queue.

import { Worker, UnrecoverableError } from 'bullmq';

const worker = new Worker(
  'foo',
  async job => {
    doSomeProcessing();
    throw new UnrecoverableError('Unrecoverable');
  },
  { connection },
);

await queue.add(
  'test-retry',
  { foo: 'bar' },
  {
    attempts: 3,
    backoff: 1000,
  },
);

Fail job when manual rate-limit

When a job is rate limited using RateLimitError and tried again, the attempts check is ignored, as rate limiting is not considered a real error. However, if you want to manually check the attempts and avoid retrying the job, you can check job.attemptsStarted as following:

import { Worker, RateLimitError, UnrecoverableError } from 'bullmq';

const worker = new Worker(
  'myQueue',
  async job => {
    const [isRateLimited, duration] = await doExternalCall();
    if (isRateLimited) {
      await queue.rateLimit(duration);
      if (job.attemptsStarted >= job.opts.attempts) {
        throw new UnrecoverableError('Unrecoverable');
      }
      // Do not forget to throw this special exception,
      // since we must differentiate this case from a failure
      // in order to move the job to wait again.
      throw new RateLimitError();
    }
  },
  {
    connection,
    limiter: {
      max: 1,
      duration: 500,
    },
  },
);

job.attemptsMade is increased when any error different than RateLimitError, DelayedError or WaitingChildrenError is thrown. While job.attemptsStarted is increased every time that a job is moved to active.

Read more:

• 💡 Rate Limit API Reference