Explicit Primitives

Why Chimpbase favours small, composable building blocks over framework magic.

Chimpbase gives you a small set of named primitives instead of a large framework abstraction. Each one does one thing and has a clear contract.

The primitives

PrimitiveWhat it does
action(...)A business operation. Called from HTTP, CLI, workflows, or other actions.
subscription(...)Reacts to an internal event. Decouples producers from consumers.
worker(...)Processes a durable background job with retries.
cron(...)Runs on a recurring schedule.
workflow(...)A long-running process that survives restarts, delays, and signals.

That's it. No base classes, no lifecycle hooks, no plugin system, no convention-over-configuration. You import a function, call it, and register the result.

Composition over convention

A Chimpbase app is a list of registrations:

const registrations = [
  createCustomer,
  subscription("customer.created", auditCustomer, {
    idempotent: true,
    name: "auditCustomer",
  }),
  worker("customer.sync", syncCustomer),
  cron("reports.daily", "0 9 * * *", generateReport),
];

You can read the full list of everything your app does in one place. There's no scanning, no auto-discovery, no decorators required (though they're available if you want them).

Why this matters

When something goes wrong at 2am, you want to be able to read the code and understand what it does. Explicit registration means:

  • Greppable — search for a queue name and find exactly where it's enqueued and consumed
  • Traceable — follow the flow from an action to a published event to a subscription to an enqueued job to a worker
  • Deletable — remove a registration and know exactly what stopped running

No framework magic means fewer surprises.

Just Use PostgreSQL
Why PostgreSQL is enough for queues, cron, workflows, and coordination.
Actions
Business operations callable from HTTP, CLI, workflows, or other actions.