What things do Fief Workers do?

[ScottFred]

I've seen examples of Fief infrastructure that include a Fief Worker in the Docker Compose.

1. How do I know if I need one?
2. What are the pros/cons of having a Fief Worker?

[frankie567]

Fief requires to have a worker running to work properly. This is where happens all the background logic, like email sending, roles/permissions updates, tokens cleanup, etc.

To ease things and get started quickly, our Docker image starts a supervisord process which will spawn all the required processes (the server, the worker and a Redis server):

fief/docker/supervisord.conf

Lines 1 to 17 in 9296856

	[supervisord]
	nodaemon=true
	[program:redis]
	command=redis-server
	[program:fief-server]
	command=fief run-server --port %(ENV_PORT)s
	stdout_logfile=/dev/stdout
	stdout_logfile_maxbytes=0
	redirect_stderr=true
	[program:fief-worker]
	command=fief run-worker -p 1 -t 1
	stdout_logfile=/dev/stdout
	stdout_logfile_maxbytes=0
	redirect_stderr=true

---

While convenient for development and test purposes, it's generally admitted that it's not a good practice to have a Docker container run several processes. That's why our Docker Compose example recommends to have separate containers for each parts: a server, a worker and a Redis (and an SQL database).

In terms of functionality, it doesn't change anything. It's just better for resilience and monitoring in production. Typically, you could independently scale the server and/or worker processes to handle more workload.

[ScottFred]

Great! Thanks for the extra details!