Wurk ⚡
Wurk, wurk. 🪓 Ready to work. Zug zug.
A 100% drop-in replacement for Sidekiq + Sidekiq Pro + Sidekiq Enterprise. Free forever. Faster.
Wurk is wire-compatible with Sidekiq — same Redis keys, same job JSON, same Ruby DSL. Swap one line in your Gemfile and your existing jobs, batches, limiters, cron entries, and live Redis data keep working untouched. The Pro and Enterprise feature sets ship in the same free gem, with no license check and no tiers.
Install
# Gemfile
gem "wurk"
# ...or drop in over an existing Sidekiq stack — delete these, add one line:
- gem "sidekiq"
- gem "sidekiq-pro", source: "https://gems.contribsys.com/"
- gem "sidekiq-ent", source: "https://enterprise.contribsys.com/"
+ gem "wurk"
bundle install && restart. That's it — Sidekiq::Worker, Sidekiq::Batch, Sidekiq::Limiter, Sidekiq.configure_server, and friends all resolve to Wurk.
Feature matrix
Everything below is in the one free gem. The "Sidekiq tier" column is only there to show what you'd otherwise pay for.
| Area | What you get | Sidekiq tier |
|---|---|---|
| Runtime | Fork-based real parallelism, reliable BLMOVE fetch, PID supervision, rolling restarts, graceful drain, scheduled/retry pollers |
OSS + Pro |
| Batches | Sidekiq::Batch with on(:success/:complete/:death) callbacks, nested batches, progress |
Pro |
| Limiters | Concurrent, bucket, window, leaky, and points rate limiters via Sidekiq::Limiter |
Enterprise |
| Periodic | Cron/periodic jobs, leader-elected so each tick fires exactly once across the cluster | Enterprise |
| Encryption | Transparent AES-256-GCM job-argument encryption with zero-downtime key rotation | Enterprise |
| Dashboard | Mountable Rails engine, precompiled React SPA (no Node needed), live SSE, charts, host-app auth hook | OSS + Pro/Ent |
Plus Wurk extras: a worker topology DSL, a Kubernetes liveness/readiness listener, and opt-in AI dashboard panes (anomaly detection, NL queries, backlog forecasting).
Documentation
- Getting started & architecture — how the swarm, manager, fetcher, and processor fit together.
- Migrating from Sidekiq — the one-line swap and what to expect.
- API reference (parity specs): Sidekiq OSS · Pro · Enterprise — the authoritative surface Wurk matches exactly.
- Securing the dashboard · Metrics history
- Compatibility & legal basis — clean-room implementation: Wurk copies the API, not the code (Google v. Oracle).
- Live demo: wurk.demo.developerz.ai
Requirements
| Component | Minimum |
|---|---|
| Ruby | >= 3.2.0 |
| Redis | >= 7.0.0 |
JRuby, TruffleRuby, and Windows fall back to threads-only mode (no fork) — behaviorally equivalent to stock Sidekiq.
The dashboard
Mount the engine wherever you like:
# config/routes.rb
mount Wurk::Engine => "/wurk"
The precompiled SPA ships inside the gem, so consumers never run Node. Gate it behind your app's auth with one line — see Securing the dashboard for Devise/Warden/Sorcery recipes:
Wurk::Web.use(Rack::Auth::Basic, "Wurk") { |user, pass| user == ENV["WURK_USER"] && pass == ENV["WURK_PASS"] }
Ship a viewer-only board (e.g. a public demo) with no auth code at all by setting WURK_WEB_READ_ONLY=1 — every mutating request returns 403 and the SPA hides destructive actions.
Encryption
A drop-in for Sidekiq::Enterprise::Crypto. It encrypts the last positional argument of a job with AES-256-GCM — the client middleware seals it on push, the server middleware opens it before perform. Earlier args stay plaintext so you can still triage on user_id.
# config/initializers/wurk.rb — point at any key source (file, ENV, KMS)
Sidekiq::Enterprise::Crypto.enable(active_version: 1) do |version|
File.binread("config/crypto/secret.#{Rails.env}.#{version}.key") # exactly 32 bytes
end
class ChargeCardJob
include Sidekiq::Job
encrypt: true
def perform(user_id, secret_bag) # secret_bag arrives already decrypted
Payments.charge(user_id, secret_bag["pan"], secret_bag["cvv"])
end
end
Keys rotate without downtime — keep every still-in-flight version resolvable so old jobs decrypt, then bump active_version. A job that can't be decrypted (key rotated away, corrupt ciphertext) goes straight to the dead set in under a second rather than crash-looping through 25 retries, with the still-encrypted payload preserved for replay. The dashboard renders encrypted args as "<encrypted>"; cleartext is never written to Redis.
Kubernetes probes
Opt in to a thin HTTP listener for liveness/readiness:
Wurk.configure_server do |config|
config.health_check(port: 7433)
end
| Path | Meaning |
|---|---|
/live |
200 while the Launcher is running; 503 once stop/quiet is called. |
/ready |
200 only when Redis is reachable and the heartbeat fired within ready_window (default 30s); 503 otherwise. |
Knobs: health_check(port:, bind: "0.0.0.0", ready_window: 30). In swarm mode only the first child to start binds the port.
Migrating from Sidekiq
- gem "sidekiq"
- gem "sidekiq-pro", source: "https://gems.contribsys.com/"
- gem "sidekiq-ent", source: "https://enterprise.contribsys.com/"
+ gem "wurk"
bundle install && restart. Wurk reads and writes the same Redis schema, so a rolling deploy can run Sidekiq and Wurk against the same Redis during the cutover. Third-party gems (sidekiq-cron, sidekiq-unique-jobs, sidekiq-scheduler, sidekiq-status, sidekiq-failures, sidekiq-throttled, …) are exercised by running their own upstream suites against Wurk in the ecosystem CI job (see test/ecosystem/).
Contributing
Issues and pull requests are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev setup, test layers, and conventions, and SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability.
License
MIT. See LICENSE.
Wurk is a clean-room reimplementation of the Sidekiq API — it copies the interface (so your jobs run unchanged), not Sidekiq's implementation code. This is the same basis the Supreme Court upheld for Google's reuse of the Java API in Google v. Oracle (2021). "Sidekiq" is a trademark of Contributed Systems, LLC; Wurk is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Full reasoning: docs/clean-room.md.