Broker lifecycle

This section describes what happens when the broker is starting & stopping.

Starting logic

The broker starts transporter connecting but it doesn’t publish the local service list to remote nodes. When it’s done, it starts all services (calls service started handler). Once all services start successfully, broker publishes the local service list to remote nodes. Hence remote nodes send requests only after all local service are started properly.

Avoid deadlocks
Dead-locks can be made when two services wait for each other. E.g.: users service has dependencies: ["posts"] and posts service has dependencies: ["users"]. To avoid it, remove the concerned service from dependencies and use this.waitForServices method in started handler instead.

Stopping logic

When you call broker.stop or stop the process, at first broker publishes an empty service list to remote nodes, so they can route the requests to other instances instead of services under stopping. Next, the broker starts stopping all local services. After that, the transporter disconnects.

Service lifecycle

This section describes what happens when a service is starting & stopping and how you should use the lifecycle event handler.

`created` event handler

It is triggered when the service instance is created (e.g.: at broker.createService or broker.loadService).
Use it to create other module instances (e.g. http server, database modules) and store them in this.

const http = require("http");

module.exports = {
    name: "www",
    created() {
        // Create HTTP server
        this.server = http.createServer(this.httpHandler);
    }
};

This is a sync event handler. You cannot return a Promise and you cannot use async/await.

`started` event handler

It is triggered when the broker.start is called and the broker starts all local services. Use it to connect to database, listen servers…etc.

module.exports = {
    name: "users",
    async started() {
        try {
            await this.db.connect();
        } catch(e) {
            throw new MoleculerServerError("Unable to connect to database.", e.message);
        }
    }
};

This is an async event handler. A Promise can be returned or use async/await.

`stopped` event handler

It is triggered when the broker.stop is called and the broker starts stopping all local services. Use it to close database connections, close sockets…etc.

module.exports = {
    name: "users",
    async stopped() {
        try {
            await this.db.disconnect();
        } catch(e) {
            this.logger.warn("Unable to stop database connection gracefully.", e);
        }
    }
};