PlainQ Documentation

PlainQ is a small, self-contained message broker written in Go. A single binary gives you reliable work queues, topic-based pub/sub, gRPC and HTTP APIs, a CLI, a terminal UI, and the Houston admin dashboard — backed by SQLite, Turso, or PostgreSQL.

Queues + pub/sub

Send work to competing consumers, or publish once to fan out into every subscribed queue.

One operational unit

Run ./plainq serve for the broker APIs, storage, metrics, and admin UI. No separate broker fleet.

Pick your storage

Embedded SQLite by default, Turso for hosted SQLite, or PostgreSQL for a shared backend.

Built for automation

Use typed gRPC and JSON-friendly CLI output for queues, plus HTTP for pub/sub and admin integrations.

Start here

Quick startFrom a fresh clone to a message round-trip in about a minute.

InstallationBuild from source, run with Docker, or deploy on Kubernetes.

Core conceptsQueues, messages, visibility timeouts, retries, and dead-letter queues.

CLI guideEvery command and the flags you'll actually use.

Source

PlainQ’s source code, issues, and discussions live on GitHub.