Create a Subscriber

In this document, you’ll learn how to create a Subscriber in your Medusa server that listens to events to perform an action.

Prerequisites

Medusa's event system works by pushing data to a Queue that each handler then gets notified of. The queuing system is based on Redis and you will therefore need to make sure that Redis is installed and configured for your Medusa project.

Then, you need to set your Redis URL in your Medusa server. By default, the Redis URL is redis://localhost:6379. If you use a different one, set the following environment variable in .env:

REDIS_URL=<YOUR_REDIS_URL>

After that, in medusa-config.js, you’ll need to comment out the following line:

module.exports = {
  projectConfig: {
    redis_url: REDIS_URL, //this line is commented out
    ...
  }
}

After that, you are able to listen to events on your server.

Implementation

After creating the file under src/subscribers, in the constructor of your subscriber, you should listen to events using eventBusService.subscribe , where eventBusService is a service injected into your subscriber’s constructor.

The eventBusService.subscribe method receives the name of the event as a first parameter and as a second parameter a method in your subscriber that will handle this event.

For example, here is the OrderNotifierSubscriber class which is created in src/subscribers/orderNotifier.js:

class OrderNotifierSubscriber {
  constructor({ eventBusService }) {
    eventBusService.subscribe("order.placed", this.handleOrder);
  }

  handleOrder = async (data) => {
    console.log("New Order: " + data.id)
  };
}

export default OrderNotifierSubscriber;

This subscriber will register the method handleOrder as one of the handlers of the order.placed event. The method handleOrder will be executed every time an order is placed, and it will receive the order ID in the data parameter. You can then use the order’s details to perform any kind of task you need.

note

The data object will not contain other order data. Only the ID of the order. You can retrieve the order information using the orderService.

Using Services in Subscribers

You can access any service through the dependencies injected to your subscriber’s constructor.

For example:

constructor({ productService, eventBusService }) {
    this.productService = productService;

    eventBusService.subscribe("order.placed", this.handleOrder);
}

You can then use this.productService anywhere in your subscriber’s methods.

What’s Next 🚀

• View the list of all events
• Learn how to create a service.