# GenStage

GenStage is a specification for exchanging events between producers and consumers.

This project currently provides the following functionality:

  * `GenStage` ([docs](https://hexdocs.pm/gen_stage/GenStage.html)) - a behaviour for implementing producer and consumer stages

  * `ConsumerSupervisor` ([docs](https://hexdocs.pm/gen_stage/ConsumerSupervisor.html)) - a supervisor designed for consuming events from GenStage and starting a child process per event

You may also be interested in two other projects built on top of GenStage:

  * [Flow](https://github.com/plataformatec/flow) for building computational flows using map-reduce, partitions, windows, and more that run concurrently. See the documentation for [Flow](https://hexdocs.pm/flow) or [José Valim's keynote at ElixirConf 2016](https://youtu.be/srtMWzyqdp8?t=244) introducing the main concepts behind GenStage and Flow
  
  * [Broadway](https://github.com/plataformatec/broadway) for building concurrent and multi-stage data ingestion and data processing pipelines to consume events from Amazon SQS, RabbitMQ, and others. See [Broadway's documentation](https://hexdocs.pm/broadway) or [José Valim's introduction to Broadway](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOExnT1PYjs)

## Examples

Examples for using GenStage and ConsumerSupervisor can be found in the [examples](examples) directory:

  * [ProducerConsumer](examples/producer_consumer.exs) - a simple example of setting up a pipeline of `A -> B -> C` stages and having events flowing through it

  * [ConsumerSupervisor](examples/consumer_supervisor.exs) - an example of how to use one or more `ConsumerSupervisor` as a consumer to a producer that works as a counter

  * [GenEvent](examples/gen_event.exs) - an example of how to use `GenStage` to implement an alternative to `GenEvent` that leverages concurrency and provides more flexibility regarding buffer size and back-pressure

  * [RateLimiter](examples/rate_limiter.exs) - an example of performing rate limiting in a GenStage pipeline

## Installation

GenStage requires Elixir v1.5. Just add `:gen_stage` to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

```elixir
def deps do
  [{:gen_stage, "~> 1.0"}]
end
```

## License

Same as Elixir.