Azure Event Hubs client library for JavaScript - version 5.11.4

  • Article

Azure Event Hubs is a highly scalable publish-subscribe service that can ingest millions of events per second and stream them to multiple consumers. This lets you process and analyze the massive amounts of data produced by your connected devices and applications. If you would like to know more about Azure Event Hubs, you may wish to review: What is Event Hubs?

The Azure Event Hubs client library allows you to send and receive events in your Node.js application.

Key links:

NOTE: If you are using version 2.1.0 or lower and want to migrate to the latest version of this package please look at our migration guide to move from EventHubs V2 to EventHubs V5

Samples for v2 and documentation are still available here:

Source code for v2.1.0 | Package for v2.1.0 (npm) | Samples for v2.1.0

Getting started

Install the package

Install the Azure Event Hubs client library using npm

npm install @azure/event-hubs

Currently supported environments

See our support policy for more details.

Prerequisites

Configure TypeScript

TypeScript users need to have Node type definitions installed:

npm install @types/node

You also need to enable compilerOptions.allowSyntheticDefaultImports in your tsconfig.json. Note that if you have enabled compilerOptions.esModuleInterop, allowSyntheticDefaultImports is enabled by default. See TypeScript's compiler options handbook for more information.

JavaScript Bundle

To use this client library in the browser, first you need to use a bundler. For details on how to do this, please refer to our bundling documentation.

In addition to what is described there, this library also needs additional polyfills for the following NodeJS core built-in modules in order to work properly in the browsers:

  • buffer
  • os
  • path
  • process

Bundling with Webpack

If you are using Webpack v5, you can install the following dev dependencies

  • npm install --save-dev os-browserify path-browserify

then add the following into your webpack.config.js

 const path = require("path");
+const webpack = require("webpack");

 module.exports = {
   entry: "./src/index.ts",
@@ -12,8 +13,21 @@ module.exports = {
       },
     ],
   },
+  plugins: [
+    new webpack.ProvidePlugin({
+      process: "process/browser",
+    }),
+    new webpack.ProvidePlugin({
+      Buffer: ["buffer", "Buffer"],
+    }),
+  ],
   resolve: {
     extensions: [".ts", ".js"],
+    fallback: {
+      buffer: require.resolve("buffer/"),
+      os: require.resolve("os-browserify"),
+      path: require.resolve("path-browserify"),
+    },
   },

Bundling with Rollup

If you are using Rollup bundler, install the following dev dependencies

  • npm install --save-dev @rollup/plugin-commonjs @rollup/plugin-inject @rollup/plugin-node-resolve

Then include the following in your rollup.config.js

+import nodeResolve from "@rollup/plugin-node-resolve";
+import cjs from "@rollup/plugin-commonjs";
+import shim from "rollup-plugin-shim";
+import inject from "@rollup/plugin-inject";

export default {
  // other configs
  plugins: [
+    shim({
+      fs: `export default {}`,
+      net: `export default {}`,
+      tls: `export default {}`,
+      path: `export default {}`,
+      dns: `export function resolve() { }`,
+    }),
+    nodeResolve({
+      mainFields: ["module", "browser"],
+      preferBuiltins: false,
+    }),
+    cjs(),
+    inject({
+      modules: {
+        Buffer: ["buffer", "Buffer"],
+        process: "process",
+      },
+      exclude: ["./**/package.json"],
+    }),
  ]
};

Please consult the documentation of your favorite bundler for more information on using polyfills.

React Native Support

Similar to browsers, React Native does not support some JavaScript API used by this SDK library so you need to provide polyfills for them. Please see the Messaging React Native sample with Expo for more details.

Authenticate the client

Interaction with Event Hubs starts with either an instance of the EventHubConsumerClient class or an instance of the EventHubProducerClient class. There are constructor overloads to support different ways of instantiating these classes as shown below:

Use connection string for the Event Hubs namespace

One of the constructor overloads takes a connection string of the form Endpoint=sb://my-servicebus-namespace.servicebus.windows.net/;SharedAccessKeyName=my-SA-name;SharedAccessKey=my-SA-key; and entity name to your Event Hub instance. You can create a consumer group and get the connection string as well as the entity name from the Azure portal.

const { EventHubProducerClient, EventHubConsumerClient } = require("@azure/event-hubs");

const producerClient = new EventHubProducerClient("my-connection-string", "my-event-hub");
const consumerClient = new EventHubConsumerClient(
  "my-consumer-group",
  "my-connection-string",
  "my-event-hub"
);

Use connection string for policy on the Event Hub

Another constructor overload takes the connection string corresponding to the shared access policy you have defined directly on the Event Hub instance (and not the Event Hubs namespace). This connection string will be of the form Endpoint=sb://my-servicebus-namespace.servicebus.windows.net/;SharedAccessKeyName=my-SA-name;SharedAccessKey=my-SA-key;EntityPath=my-event-hub-name. The key difference in the connection string format from the previous constructor overload is the ;EntityPath=my-event-hub-name.

const { EventHubProducerClient, EventHubConsumerClient } = require("@azure/event-hubs");

const producerClient = new EventHubProducerClient("my-connection-string-with-entity-path");
const consumerClient = new EventHubConsumerClient(
  "my-consumer-group",
  "my-connection-string-with-entity-path"
);

Use the Event Hubs namespace and Azure Identity

This constructor overload takes the host name and entity name of your Event Hub instance and credential that implements the TokenCredential interface. This allows you to authenticate using an Azure Active Directory principal. There are implementations of the TokenCredential interface available in the @azure/identity package. The host name is of the format <yournamespace>.servicebus.windows.net. When using Azure Active Directory, your principal must be assigned a role which allows access to Event Hubs, such as the Azure Event Hubs Data Owner role. For more information about using Azure Active Directory authorization with Event Hubs, please refer to the associated documentation.

const { EventHubProducerClient, EventHubConsumerClient } = require("@azure/event-hubs");

const { DefaultAzureCredential } = require("@azure/identity");
const credential = new DefaultAzureCredential();
const producerClient = new EventHubProducerClient("my-host-name", "my-event-hub", credential);
const consumerClient = new EventHubConsumerClient(
  "my-consumer-group",
  "my-host-name",
  "my-event-hub",
  credential
);

Key concepts

  • An Event Hub producer is a source of telemetry data, diagnostics information, usage logs, or other log data, as part of an embedded device solution, a mobile device application, a game title running on a console or other device, some client or server based business solution, or a web site.

  • An Event Hub consumer picks up such information from the Event Hub and processes it. Processing may involve aggregation, complex computation and filtering. Processing may also involve distribution or storage of the information in a raw or transformed fashion. Event Hub consumers are often robust and high-scale platform infrastructure parts with built-in analytics capabilities, like Azure Stream Analytics, Apache Spark, or Apache Storm.

  • A partition is an ordered sequence of events that is held in an Event Hub. Partitions are a means of data organization associated with the parallelism required by event consumers. Azure Event Hubs provides message streaming through a partitioned consumer pattern in which each consumer only reads a specific subset, or partition, of the message stream. As newer events arrive, they are added to the end of this sequence. The number of partitions is specified at the time an Event Hub is created and cannot be changed.

  • A consumer group is a view of an entire Event Hub. Consumer groups enable multiple consuming applications to each have a separate view of the event stream, and to read the stream independently at their own pace and from their own position. There can be at most 5 concurrent readers on a partition per consumer group; however it is recommended that there is only one active consumer for a given partition and consumer group pairing. Each active reader receives all of the events from its partition; If there are multiple readers on the same partition, then they will receive duplicate events.

For more concepts and deeper discussion, see: Event Hubs Features

Guidance around retries

The EventHubConsumerClient and EventHubProducerClient accept options where you can set the retryOptions that allow you to tune how the SDK handles transient errors. Examples of transient errors include temporary network or service issues.

Retries when consuming events

If a transient error (e.g. a temporary network issue) is encountered while the SDK is receiving events, it will retry receiving events based on the retry options passed into the EventHubConsumerClient. If the maximum retry attempts are exhausted, the processError function will be invoked.

You can use the retry settings to control how quickly you are informed about temporary issues such as a network connection issue. For example, if you need to know when there is a network issue right away you can lower the values for maxRetries and retryDelayInMs.

After executing the processError function, the client continues to receive events from the partition as long as the error was a retryable one. Otherwise, the client invokes the user-provided processClose function. This function is also invoked when either you stop the subscription or when the client stops reading events from the current partition due to it being picked up by another instance of your application as part of load balancing.

The processClose function provides an opportunity to update checkpoints if needed. After executing processClose, the client (or in the case of load balancing, a client from another instance of you application) will invoke the user-provided processInitialize function to resume reading events from the last updated checkpoint for the same partition.

If you wish to stop attempting to read events, you must call close() on the subscription returned by the subscribe method.

Examples

The following sections provide code snippets that cover some of the common tasks using Azure Event Hubs

Inspect an Event Hub

Many Event Hub operations take place within the scope of a specific partition. Because partitions are owned by the Event Hub, their names are assigned at the time of creation. To understand what partitions are available, you query the Event Hub using either of the two clients available: EventHubProducerClient or EventHubConsumerClient

In the below example, we are using an EventHubProducerClient.

const { EventHubProducerClient } = require("@azure/event-hubs");

async function main() {
  const client = new EventHubProducerClient("connectionString", "eventHubName");

  const partitionIds = await client.getPartitionIds();

  await client.close();
}

main();

Publish events to an Event Hub

In order to publish events, you'll need to create an EventHubProducerClient. While the below example shows one way to create the client, see the Authenticate the client section to learn other ways to instantiate the client.

You may publish events to a specific partition, or allow the Event Hubs service to decide which partition events should be published to. It is recommended to use automatic routing when the publishing of events needs to be highly available or when event data should be distributed evenly among the partitions. In the example below, we will take advantage of automatic routing.

  • Create an EventDataBatch object using the createBatch
  • Add events to the batch using the tryAdd method. You can do this until the maximum batch size limit is reached or until you are done adding the number of events you liked, whichever comes first. This method would return false to indicate that no more events can be added to the batch due to the max batch size being reached.
  • Send the batch of events using the sendBatch method.

In the below example, we attempt to send 10 events to Azure Event Hubs.

const { EventHubProducerClient } = require("@azure/event-hubs");

async function main() {
  const producerClient = new EventHubProducerClient("connectionString", "eventHubName");

  const eventDataBatch = await producerClient.createBatch();
  let numberOfEventsToSend = 10;

  while (numberOfEventsToSend > 0) {
    let wasAdded = eventDataBatch.tryAdd({ body: "my-event-body" });
    if (!wasAdded) {
      break;
    }
    numberOfEventsToSend--;
  }

  await producerClient.sendBatch(eventDataBatch);
  await producerClient.close();
}

main();

There are options you can pass at different stages to control the process of sending events to Azure Event Hubs.

  • The EventHubProducerClient constructor takes an optional parameter of type EventHubClientOptions which you can use to specify options like number of retries.
  • The createBatch method takes an optional parameter of type CreateBatchOptions which you can use to speicify the max batch size supported by the batch being created.
  • The sendBatch method takes an optional parameter of type SendBatchOptions which you can use to specify abortSignal to cancel current operation.
  • In case you want to send to a specific partition, an overload of the sendBatch method allows you to pass the id of the partition to send events to. The Inspect an Event Hub example above shows how to fetch the available partitions ids.

Note: When working with Azure Stream Analytics, the body of the event being sent should be a JSON object as well. For example: body: { "message": "Hello World" }

Consume events from an Event Hub

To consume events from an Event Hub instance, you also need to know which consumer group you want to target. Once you know this, you are ready to create an EventHubConsumerClient. While the below example shows one way to create the client, see the Authenticate the client section to learn other ways to instantiate the client.

The subscribe method on the client has overloads which, combined with the constructor, can cater to several ways to consume events:

The subscribe method takes an optional parameter of type SubscriptionOptions which you can use to specify options like the maxBatchSize (number of events to wait for) and maxWaitTimeInSeconds (amount of time to wait for maxBatchSize events to arrive).

Consume events in a single process

Begin by creating an instance of the EventHubConsumerClient, and then call the subscribe() method on it to start consuming events.

The subscribe method takes callbacks to process events as they are received from Azure Event Hubs. To stop receiving events, you can call close() on the object returned by the subscribe() method.

const { EventHubConsumerClient, earliestEventPosition } = require("@azure/event-hubs");

async function main() {
  const client = new EventHubConsumerClient(
    "my-consumer-group",
    "connectionString",
    "eventHubName"
  );

  // In this sample, we use the position of earliest available event to start from
  // Other common options to configure would be `maxBatchSize` and `maxWaitTimeInSeconds`
  const subscriptionOptions = {
    startPosition: earliestEventPosition
  };

  const subscription = client.subscribe(
    {
      processEvents: async (events, context) => {
        // event processing code goes here
      },
      processError: async (err, context) => {
        // error reporting/handling code here
      }
    },
    subscriptionOptions
  );

  // Wait for a few seconds to receive events before closing
  setTimeout(async () => {
    await subscription.close();
    await client.close();
    console.log(`Exiting sample`);
  }, 3 * 1000);
}

main();

Consume events with load balanced across multiple processes

Azure Event Hubs is capable of dealing with millions of events per second. To scale your processing application, you can run multiple instances of your application and have it balance the load among themselves.

Begin by creating an instance of the EventHubConsumerClient using one of the constructor overloads that take a CheckpointStore, and then call the subscribe() method to start consuming events. The checkpoint store will enable the subscribers within a consumer group to coordinate the processing between multiple instances of your application.

In this example, we will use the BlobCheckpointStore from the @azure/eventhubs-checkpointstore-blob package which implements the required read/writes to a durable store by using Azure Blob Storage.

The subscribe method takes callbacks to process events as they are received from Azure Event Hubs. To stop receiving events, you can call close() on the object returned by the subscribe() method.

const { EventHubConsumerClient } = require("@azure/event-hubs");
const { ContainerClient } = require("@azure/storage-blob");
const { BlobCheckpointStore } = require("@azure/eventhubs-checkpointstore-blob");

const storageAccountConnectionString = "storage-account-connection-string";
const containerName = "container-name";
const eventHubConnectionString = "eventhub-connection-string";
const consumerGroup = "my-consumer-group";
const eventHubName = "eventHubName";

async function main() {
  const blobContainerClient = new ContainerClient(storageAccountConnectionString, containerName);

  if (!(await blobContainerClient.exists())) {
    await blobContainerClient.create();
  }

  const checkpointStore = new BlobCheckpointStore(blobContainerClient);
  const consumerClient = new EventHubConsumerClient(
    consumerGroup,
    eventHubConnectionString,
    eventHubName,
    checkpointStore
  );

  const subscription = consumerClient.subscribe({
    processEvents: async (events, context) => {
      // event processing code goes here
      if (events.length === 0) {
        // If the wait time expires (configured via options in maxWaitTimeInSeconds) Event Hubs
        // will pass you an empty array.
        return;
      }

      // Checkpointing will allow your service to pick up from
      // where it left off when restarting.
      //
      // You'll want to balance how often you checkpoint with the
      // performance of your underlying checkpoint store.
      await context.updateCheckpoint(events[events.length - 1]);
    },
    processError: async (err, context) => {
      // handle any errors that occur during the course of
      // this subscription
      console.log(`Errors in subscription to partition ${context.partitionId}: ${err}`);
    }
  });

  // Wait for a few seconds to receive events before closing
  await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, 10 * 1000));

  await subscription.close();
  await consumerClient.close();
  console.log(`Exiting sample`);
}

main();

Please see Balance partition load across multiple instances of your application to learn more.

Consume events from a single partition

Begin by creating an instance of the EventHubConsumerClient, and then call the subscribe() method on it to start consuming events. Pass the id of the partition you want to target to the subscribe() method to consume only from that partition.

In the below example, we are using the first partition.

The subscribe method takes callbacks to process events as they are received from Azure Event Hubs. To stop receiving events, you can call close() on the object returned by the subscribe() method.

const { EventHubConsumerClient, earliestEventPosition } = require("@azure/event-hubs");

async function main() {
  const client = new EventHubConsumerClient(
    "my-consumer-group",
    "connectionString",
    "eventHubName"
  );
  const partitionIds = await client.getPartitionIds();

  // In this sample, we use the position of earliest available event to start from
  // Other common options to configure would be `maxBatchSize` and `maxWaitTimeInSeconds`
  const subscriptionOptions = {
    startPosition: earliestEventPosition
  };

  const subscription = client.subscribe(
    partitionIds[0],
    {
      processEvents: async (events, context) => {
        // event processing code goes here
      },
      processError: async (err, context) => {
        // error reporting/handling code here
      }
    },
    subscriptionOptions
  );

  // Wait for a few seconds to receive events before closing
  setTimeout(async () => {
    await subscription.close();
    await client.close();
    console.log(`Exiting sample`);
  }, 3 * 1000);
}

main();

Use EventHubConsumerClient to work with IotHub

You can use EventHubConsumerClient to work with IotHub as well. This is useful for receiving telemetry data of IotHub from the linked EventHub. The associated connection string will not have send claims, hence sending events is not possible.

  • Please notice that the connection string needs to be for an Event Hub-compatible endpoint (e.g. "Endpoint=sb://my-iothub-namespace-[uid].servicebus.windows.net/;SharedAccessKeyName=my-SA-name;SharedAccessKey=my-SA-key;EntityPath=my-iot-hub-name")
const { EventHubConsumerClient } = require("@azure/event-hubs");

async function main() {
  const client = new EventHubConsumerClient(
    "my-consumer-group",
    "Endpoint=sb://my-iothub-namespace-[uid].servicebus.windows.net/;SharedAccessKeyName=my-SA-name;SharedAccessKey=my-SA-key;EntityPath=my-iot-hub-name"
  );
  await client.getEventHubProperties();
  // retrieve partitionIds from client.getEventHubProperties() or client.getPartitionIds()
  const partitionId = "0";
  await client.getPartitionProperties(partitionId);

  await client.close();
}

main();

Troubleshooting

AMQP Dependencies

The Event Hubs library depends on the rhea-promise library for managing connections, sending and receiving events over the AMQP protocol.

Logging

You can set the AZURE_LOG_LEVEL environment variable to enable logging to stderr:

export AZURE_LOG_LEVEL=verbose

For more detailed instructions on how to enable logs, you can look at the @azure/logger package docs.

You can alternatively set the DEBUG environment variable to get logs when using this library. This can be useful if you also want to emit logs from the dependencies rhea-promise and rhea as well.

Note: AZURE_LOG_LEVEL, if set, takes precedence over DEBUG. Do not specify any azure libraries via DEBUG when also specifying AZURE_LOG_LEVEL or calling setLogLevel.

  • Getting only info level debug logs from the Event Hubs SDK.
export DEBUG=azure:*:info
  • Getting debug logs from the Event Hubs SDK and the protocol level library.
export DEBUG=azure*,rhea*
  • If you are not interested in viewing the raw event data (which consumes a large amount of console/disk space) then you can set the DEBUG environment variable as follows:
export DEBUG=azure*,rhea*,-rhea:raw,-rhea:message
  • If you are interested only in errors and SDK warnings, then you can set the DEBUG environment variable as follows:
export DEBUG=azure:*:(error|warning),rhea-promise:error,rhea:events,rhea:frames,rhea:io,rhea:flow

Next steps

More sample code

Please take a look at the samples directory for detailed examples of how to use this library to send and receive events to/from Event Hubs.

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute to this library, please read the contributing guide to learn more about how to build and test the code.

Impressions