The open, language-agnostic standard for background job processing.

Specification · Website · Playground · Discussions

Open Job Spec (OJS) is a vendor-neutral envelope format and protocol for background job processing. It defines a universal standard so that producers, consumers, and backends can interoperate regardless of language, framework, or infrastructure.

OJS provides:

• 🎯 Universal job envelope — A single schema for job metadata, args, and lifecycle state
• 🔄 8-state lifecycle — scheduled → available → pending → active → completed/retryable/cancelled/discarded
• 🌐 Protocol bindings — HTTP and gRPC, with extensible transport support
• 📦 Wire formats — JSON and Protobuf serialization
• 🔌 Extensions — Retries, cron scheduling, workflows, unique jobs, middleware, and events

Think of it as CloudEvents, but for background jobs.

Repository	Stack	Status
ojs-backend-redis	Go + Redis 7 + Lua scripts
ojs-backend-postgres	Go + PostgreSQL 15 + SKIP LOCKED

# Enqueue a job via HTTP
curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/v1/jobs \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "type": "email.send",
    "args": ["user@example.com", "Welcome!", "Thanks for signing up."],
    "queue": "default"
  }'

Every SDK follows the same pattern — Client (producer) and Worker (consumer):

// TypeScript — Enqueue
const client = new OJSClient({ baseUrl: "http://localhost:8080" });
await client.enqueue({ type: "email.send", args: ["user@example.com"] });

// TypeScript — Process
const worker = new OJSWorker({ baseUrl: "http://localhost:8080" });
worker.register("email.send", async (job) => {
  await sendEmail(...job.args);
});
await worker.start();

OJS follows a three-layer model inspired by CloudEvents:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Layer 3: Protocol Bindings                 │
│  HTTP · gRPC                                │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Layer 2: Wire Formats                      │
│  JSON · Protobuf                            │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Layer 1: Core Specification                │
│  Job Envelope · Lifecycle · Operations      │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

We welcome contributions of all kinds. Here's how you can help:

• 🐛 Report bugs — Found an issue? Open a bug report
• 💡 Request features — Have an idea? Submit a feature request
• 📝 Propose spec changes — All changes go through our RFC process
• 🔧 Build an implementation — Write an OJS backend or SDK in a new language
• ✅ Run conformance tests — Validate implementations with our test suite
• 💬 Join the discussion — GitHub Discussions

Please read our Contributing Guide and Code of Conduct before participating.

All Open Job Spec projects are licensed under the Apache License 2.0.