NATS API

Introduction

The Neural Autonomic Transport System, or NATS, is an open-source messaging system written in Go. It is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and has more than 40 client language implementations. The application has been designed with performance, scalability, and ease of use in mind. If you're new to NATS, you can learn more about it on our NATS overview page.

Concepts

Refer to our dedicated concepts page to find definitions of all terminology related to NATS, Queues, and Topics and Events.

Quickstart

1. Configure your environment variables

   Note

   This is an optional step that seeks to simplify your usage of the API.

   export SCW_SECRET_KEY="<API secret key>"
   export SCW_PROJECT_ID="<Scaleway Project ID>"
   

2. Create a NATS account. A NATS account provides a scope for your NATS streams, messages and credentials.

   curl --silent -X POST \
     -H "X-Auth-Token: $SCW_SECRET_KEY" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     "https://api.scaleway.com/mnq/v1beta1/regions/fr-par/nats-accounts" \
       -d '{
         "name": "my-nats-account",
         "project_id": "'$SCW_PROJECT_ID'"
       }' | tee my-nats-account.json | jq
   

   Tip

   • | tee my-nats-account.json saves the JSON object returned by the API to a file (used by next steps)
   • | jq displays the output nicely

3. Create credentials. Credentials are necessary to authenticate a client to the NATS service. The nats_account_id field is automatically set to the value of id returned by the previous command:

   curl --silent -X POST \
     -H "X-Auth-Token: $SCW_SECRET_KEY" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     "https://api.scaleway.com/mnq/v1beta1/regions/fr-par/nats-credentials" \
       -d '{
         "name": "my-credentials",
         "nats_account_id": "'$(jq -r .id my-nats-account.json)'"
       }' | tee my-nats-credentials.json | jq
   

4. Extract the credentials you created in the previous step:

   jq -r .credentials.content my-nats-credentials.json > nats.creds
   

5. Publish your first message with the NATS CLI. Open two terminals for this purpose.

   • On terminal 1: subscribe to a subject

     nats sub -s $(jq -r .endpoint my-nats-account.json) --creds nats.creds my-subject
     

   • On terminal 2: publish a message to this subject:

     nats pub -s $(jq -r .endpoint my-nats-account.json) --creds nats.creds my-subject 'Hi there!'
     

   The "Hi there!" message should appear on the terminal 1. You can now abort the subscription by typing "CTRL+C" on terminal 1.

6. Delete the NATS account

   curl --silent -X DELETE \
     -H "X-Auth-Token: $SCW_SECRET_KEY" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
       "https://api.scaleway.com/mnq/v1beta1/regions/fr-par/nats-accounts/$(jq -r .id my-nats-account.json)" | jq
   

Technical limitations

The maximum storage capacity of a NATS account is 300 MB. Be aware that replicates are counted into this quota.

Technical information

Regional availability

Scaleway NATS is currently available in the following regions:

• Paris, France (fr-par)
• Amsterdam, Netherlands (nl-ams)

NATS credentials

Credentials give full access to the NATS account. Isolation can be handled by using several NATS accounts.

TLS

Note that the Scaleway NATS server is configured with TLS, and as such will require all clients to connect with TLS. In the case of the NATS SDK however, the SDK abstracts this and handles the TLS connection itself.

Going further

For more help using Scaleway NATS, check out the following resources:

• Our main documentation
• The #messaging-queuing channel on our Slack community
• Our support ticketing system

You can also read the official NATS documentation:

• What is NATS
• Installing & using the NATS CLI
• JetStream official documentation (JetStream is enabled with quotas on our servers)
• Official NATS GitHub: official client library for many languages (golang, python, rust etc.) and many other coding resources
• NATS community Slack channel.