Sidekiq

Sidekiq is an open source background job framework written in Ruby.^[3]

Sidekiq
Developer	Mike Perham
Initial release	February 5, 2012; 13 years ago (2012-02-05)[1]
Stable release	8.0.7[2]  / 8 August 2025; 59 days ago (8 August 2025)
Repository	github.com/sidekiq/sidekiq
Written in	Ruby
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	English
Type	Working queue
License	LGPLv3
Website	sidekiq.org

Architecture

Sidekiq uses Redis for its persistent data store. Each job is stored as a map of key/value pairs, serialized using JSON. Developers can use any programming language to create jobs by constructing the necessary JSON and pushing it into the queue in Redis. A Sidekiq process reads jobs from that Redis queue, using the First In First Out (FIFO) model, and executes the corresponding Ruby code. Job processing is asynchronous, allowing a web-serving thread to continue serving new requests rather than be blocked processing slower tasks.

Sidekiq can be used standalone, or integrated with a Ruby on Rails web application. Sidekiq is multithreaded so multiple jobs can execute concurrently within one process. A large scale application may have dozens or hundreds of Sidekiq processes executing thousands of jobs per second.

Sidekiq comes with a graphical web interface for inspecting and managing job data.

Business model

Sidekiq uses an Open Core business model to provide sustainability for the open source project.^[4] The company behind Sidekiq, Contributed Systems, sells closed-source commercial versions, Sidekiq Pro and Sidekiq Enterprise, which contain additional features not included in the open source version.

Reception and use

Sidekiq is described as “well-known queue processing software”.^[5]

It's used by Ruby applications like Mastodon, Diaspora,^[6] GitLab and Discourse, that need to run tasks in the background, without making web requests wait. Sidekiq is also used to submit threads to the PHASTER phage search tool.^[7]