Lightweight Task queue on Erlang/OTP, SQLite-backed, no overengineering
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Setting up Kafka or such enterprise oriented software with their clusters or dedicated servers is heavy and bothering enough that most small teams or indie hackers skip it entirely and making compromise to use in-memory queues.I wanted something in between: a persistent queue that is simple to run (one binary, which makes one sqlite db), gets real fault isolation and crash recovery due to Elixir, easy to inspect (open ezra.db in any SQLite browser and see every task), and requires no new client library - it speaks the Redis Streams wire protocol, so any Redis client in any language just works out of the box.Very short demo video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLYyD3DVWmE]
HN · launched Jun 10, 2026 · 75 upvotes (top 11%) · 0 views
Niche: queue management systems · 20 launches, 2 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Data infrastructure
- Developer
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 20 launches in queue management systems →
Could you build this?
No Writing a robust, fault-tolerant task queue in Erlang/OTP that manages SQLite concurrency without locking issues requires specialized knowledge of the BEAM virtual machine and OTP supervision trees.
What it would actually take: Requires implementing an Erlang/OTP application using `gen_server` and supervision trees, handling SQLite's single-writer concurrency limits using BEAM message queues to serialize transactions, and implementing at-least-once message delivery, crash recovery, and backpressure. Deep familiarity with Erlang semantics, NIF bindings for SQLite, and distributed systems durability is required.
Discussion
18 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Oban, AWS SQS, smoothmq, pgmq/PgFlow, simple_queue
Concerns raised: Lightweight claims contradicted by Docker/container usage, Single author, no pull requests accepted, Limited to Elixir ecosystem, not available for other languages like Rust, May be overengineered despite project claims
Feature requests: Clarify task storage/persistence mechanism, Support for other programming language ecosystems beyond Elixir
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 186 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #25 of 187 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 224 days after the earliest competitor.
- Bunqueue · hn · 2026-02-02 · 39 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- I created a library for correctly using SQLite in Go programs · hn · 2026-11-11 · 26 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- twelve-dollar-server-challenge · github · 2026-10-03 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Pq · hn · 2026-02-22 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Diom · hn · 2026-05-03 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- BlazeMQ · hn · 2026-02-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Uber's new publicly available RPC Kafka repository · hn · 2026-02-13 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Real-workload SQLite benchmarks on Hetzner's cheapest VPS · hn · 2026-05-09 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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