SdbLock

Poor man's distributed lock using SimpleDB. It is useful when you don't want to maintain distributed lock server by yourself.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'sdb_lock'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install sdb_lock

Usage

require 'sdb_lock'

lock = SdbLock.new(
  'my_app_lock_domain',  # SimpleDB domain name to use
  create_domain: true,   # At the first time, you will need to create domain. Note it might take long time.

  # Other hash members will be passed to AWS::SimpleDB#new as is.
  # You can set credential by other ways including environmental variables.
  # See https://github.com/amazonwebservices/aws-sdk-for-ruby

  # see http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#sdb_region
  simple_db_endpoint: "sdb.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com",
  access_key_id: YOUR_AWS_ACCESS_KEY,
  secret_access_key: YOUR_AWS_SECRET
)

locked = lock.try_lock("a1") do
  # do some work
end

# if you want to block until gain lock, then use #lock
# WARN There is no way to wake up others. It is slow with high contention
#   because it does polling internally.
lock.lock("a1") do
  # do some work
end

# List locked resource names
lock.locked_resources

# Some times lock might remain because of network failure. Then we'll need
# a way to unlock these.
#
# Unlock older than 10 secs.
lock.unlock_old(10)

Test

AWS_REGION environmental variable is required to run tests.

$ AWS_REGION=ap-northeast-1 bundle exec rake

Limitation

• Lock might remain by network failure or other reason. See #unlock_old.
• Number of domains are limited by SimpleDB.
• Each Lock is represented by an item in SimpleDB. Number of items are limited by SimpleDB.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request