services

Background Worker

Run long-lived processes that do not serve HTTP traffic.

A background worker is a long-running process that does not receive HTTP requests. Use it for job processors, queue consumers, data pipelines, and any work that runs continuously in the background.

When to Use#

Job queue processors (Sidekiq, Celery, BullMQ)
Message consumers (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
Data pipelines and ETL processes
Monitoring agents or scrapers

Configuration#

runix.yaml

yaml

services:
  - name: worker
    type: background-worker
    repo: https://github.com/alice/job-processor
    instance: standard
    env:
      DATABASE_URL: "${db.connection_string}"
      REDIS_URL: "${cache.connection_string}"

Available Fields#

Field	Default	Description
`repo`	—	GitHub repository URL (required)
`branch`	`main`	Git branch to deploy
`instance`	`starter`	Instance type
`build_command`	Auto-detected	Override the build command
`start_command`	Auto-detected	Override the start command
`env`	None	Environment variables

Key Differences from Web Services#

No public URL is assigned — the worker is not reachable from the internet
No health check path — the container is considered healthy as long as the process is running
If the process exits, the container restarts automatically

Background workers can still connect to other services using internal networking or connection strings from database services.

Static Site

Cron Job