KubeMQ
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Basic Pub/Sub

Publish and subscribe to real-time KubeMQ events with the Python SDK in a basic pub/sub example.

Overview

This tutorial builds the "hello world" of KubeMQ messaging: a publisher and a subscriber talking over the Events pattern. Events are fire-and-forget — the broker fans a message out to every subscriber currently listening on the channel and moves on. There's no persistence, no acknowledgment, and no replay, which makes this the pattern to reach for when you need low-latency, high-throughput broadcast (metrics ticks, live status updates, cache-invalidation signals) and can tolerate losing a message if nobody is listening at the moment it's sent.

You'll wire up subscribe_to_events with an EventsSubscription, give the subscription a moment to register with the server, then call publish_event to publish an EventMessage. The subscription's channel accepts every message published to it — every connected subscriber gets its own copy, as opposed to a consumer group where only one member would receive it. Gotchas: if the subscriber isn't fully established before you publish, the event is simply gone — there's no queue catching it, which is why the sample sleeps briefly before sending; and because delivery isn't acknowledged, a crashed or disconnected subscriber never knows it missed anything.

Prerequisites

  • KubeMQ server running on localhost:50000
  • Python SDK installed (pip install kubemq)

Code

basic_pubsub.py
"""Example: Basic pub/sub — publish and subscribe to events."""

from __future__ import annotations

import asyncio

from kubemq import (
    AsyncCancellationToken,
    AsyncPubSubClient,
    EventMessage,
    EventReceived,
    EventsSubscription,
    KubeMQConnectionError,
    KubeMQError,
)


async def main() -> None:
    try:
        async with AsyncPubSubClient(
            address="localhost:50000",  # TODO: Replace with your KubeMQ server address
            client_id="python-events-basic-pubsub-client",
        ) as client:
            token = AsyncCancellationToken()

            async def subscriber() -> None:
                async for event in client.subscribe_to_events(
                    subscription=EventsSubscription(
                        channel="python-events.basic-pubsub",
                        on_receive_event_callback=lambda e: None,
                        on_error_callback=lambda e: print(f"Error: {e}"),
                    ),
                    cancellation_token=token,
                ):
                    print(
                        f"Received — Id:{event.id}, Channel:{event.channel}, "
                        f"Body:{event.body.decode('utf-8')}"
                    )

            task = asyncio.create_task(subscriber())
            await asyncio.sleep(1)

            await client.publish_event(
                EventMessage(
                    channel="python-events.basic-pubsub",
                    body=b"hello kubemq",
                )
            )
            print("Event sent")

            await asyncio.sleep(2)
            token.cancel()
            task.cancel()
            try:
                await task
            except asyncio.CancelledError:
                pass
    except KubeMQConnectionError as e:
        print(f"Connection error: {e}")
    except KubeMQError as e:
        print(f"KubeMQ error: {e}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

# Expected output:
# Received — Id:<message-id>, Channel:python-events.basic-pubsub, Body:hello kubemq
# Event sent

How It Works

  • AsyncPubSubClient is used as an async context manager (async with) so the connection is automatically closed on exit.
  • subscribe_to_events is an async generator: the async for loop yields each EventReceived as it arrives from the server.
  • AsyncCancellationToken signals the generator to stop; calling token.cancel() causes the async for loop to finish.
  • publish_event sends a fire-and-forget EventMessage; there is no per-subscriber delivery acknowledgement.

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