node-range-lock

Distributed time-range based locking engine backed by redis and MySQL

range-lock was designed for use in a booking/appointments management app, where need to lock a key, but only want to have that lock affect a certain range of time (the appointment you're attempting to create). In such a distributed system, the times required for a lock to remain open can be anywhere between 1 second and 2 minutes dependant upon the external processes involved (such as charging cards etc). In such a situation, locking the entire key just doesn't make sense, especially if you have a high concurrency of creates for a certain key.

Setup

You need a redis instance for thread-safeness, as well as a MySQL DB for the actual lock store.

The constructor for range-lock takes two parameters:

• A function that will return an instance of the node 'redis' client
• A URL pointing to a MySQL database (this uses sequelize under the hood)

E.g.

var RangeLock = require('range-lock');
var rangeLock = new RangeLock(require('redis').createClient(), 'mysql://root:pass@localhost/locks');

Usage

range-lock instances have 3 methods you'll use to set, get and clear locks

set(key, startUnixTimestamp, endUnixTimestamp, stringDataOrNull, ttlMS, callback)

rangeLock.set('my-key', 10, 20, 'this is a test', 30000, function(err, success, lock) {
    if(err) throw err;

    if(success) {
        // lock.id can now be used alongside the key to retrieve/clear the lock information in another process / request
    }
    else {
        // this key has an overlapping lock currently set
        // lock is the overlapping lock in case you want to inspect it / return the information to the client
    }
});

get(key, lockID, callback)

var lock = rangeLock.get('my-key', 'lock-id-returned-from-set', function(err, lock) {
    if(err) throw err;

    if(lock === false) {
        // the lock has gone away
    }
    else {
        // lock is now equal to the same object you got back from lockStore#set earlier
        // lock.data contains the string data you passed in, if any
    }
});

clear(key, lockID, callback)

rangeLock.clear('my-key', 'lock-id-returned-from-set', function(err) {
    if(err) throw err;

    // lock is now cleared
});

We also provide a convienience method on 'lock' instances returned from #set and #get, allowing you to call lock.release (this is just bound to lockStore.clear)

E.g.

var lock = rangeLock.get('my-key', 'lock-id-returned-from-set', function(err, lock) {
    if(err) throw err;

    if(lock !== false) {
        // we have a valid lock

        // do something

        // now release the lock
        lock.release(optionalCallback);
    }
});