nu_plugin_nuts

Nushell plugin for communicating with a Nats server

Why

Nats already has a CLI tool and this plugin is not intended to replace it. However, the official CLI tool's performance is not great when working with bulk data to a point that I would say it's basically unusable. Publishing 1000 message of random bytes results in the following:

timeit { generate {|data| {out: $data, next: (random chars --length 8) } } (random chars --length 8) | take 1_000 | each { nats pub mysubject $in e> /dev/null } }
1min 1sec 656ms 305µs 542ns 

Even with par-each, while better, the situation is not that great:

timeit { generate {|data| {out: $data, next: (random chars --length 8) } } (random chars --length 8) | take 1_000 | par-each { nats pub mysubject $in e> /dev/null } }
36sec 502ms 574µs 792ns

With this plugin the performance of bulk operations are much better even on a cold start:

timeit { generate {|data| {out: $data, next: (random chars --length 8) } } (random chars --length 8) | take 1_000 | nuts connect | nuts pub mysubject }
61ms 217µs 833ns

While the Nats CLI has a bulk publish operation it relies on Go templating which is not always preferable. It also performs worse than this plugin:

timeit { ^nats pub --count=1000 mysubject "{{ Random 8 8 }}" }
703ms 391µs 125ns

Installing

Since Nushell is still in pre-production stage the recommended way of installing is to clone the repository, change the nu protocol version to your Nushell version and build it yourself.

git clone https://github.com/dam4rus/nu_plugin_nuts.git
cd nu_plugin_nuts
cargo install --path .
plugin add ~/.cargo/bin/nu_plugin_nuts
plugin use nuts

Usage

The plugin currently stores a single connection to a Nats server. This connection can be opened with the nuts connect command. This connection is open for the lifetime of the plugin.

One way to use this plugin is to call nuts connect then call other operations while the plugin is alive.

nuts connect
'message' | nuts pub mysubject

Make sure to set the gc for the plugin to a duration you are comfortable with.

nuts connect also pipes it's input to it's output, so it can be used in a pipe operation as well:

'message' | nuts connect | nuts pub mysubject

Refer to each commands documentation to see it's usage