message_formats.md

Message Formats

There are two different types of message formats.

See the main design diagram for reference.

Broker Message Format

This is the format when a client submits a task to be ran, for example, to pg_notify. This contains JSON-serialized data.

Example:

{
  "uuid": "9760671a-6261-45aa-881a-f66929ff9725",
  "args": [4],
  "kwargs": {},
  "task": "awx.main.tasks.jobs.RunJob",
  "time_pub": 1727354869.5126922,
  "guid": "8f887a0c51f7450db3542c501ba83756"
}

The "task" contains an importable task to run.

If you are doing the control-and-reply for something, then the submitted message will also contain a "reply_to" key for the channel to send the reply to.

The message sent to the reply channel will have some other purpose-specific information, like debug information.

Internal Worker Pool Format

The main process and workers communicate through conventional IPC queues. This contains the messages to start running a job, of course. Ideally, this only contains the bare minimum, because tracking stats and lifetime are the job of the main process, not the worker.

{
  "args": [4],
  "kwargs": {},
  "task": "awx.main.tasks.jobs.RunJob",
}

Worker to Main Process

When the worker communicates information back to the main process, it must identify itself, and identify the event. For example:

{
    "worker": 3,
    "event": "ready"
}