Intent Bus

Intent Bus is a lightweight, distributed job coordinator designed for developers who want reliable task execution without managing broker infrastructure. Instead of spinning up Redis, Celery, or RabbitMQ, you deploy a single Flask container backed by a local SQLite database. Workers running on a VPS, Raspberry Pi, Android phone (Termux), or any machine poll for jobs over standard HTTP.

Key Features:

• Atomic Locking: Cryptographic claim tokens prevent double-claiming across concurrent workers
• Reliable Delivery: Expired leases auto-requeue jobs with exponential backoff
• Dead-Letter Queue: Failed jobs are archived, not lost
• Priority Scheduling: High-priority jobs are always claimed first
• Capability Routing: Route jobs to workers that advertise specific capabilities (e.g. ffmpeg, gpu)
• Worker Targeting: Send a job to a specific named worker
• Namespace Isolation: Separate workloads by namespace
• Optional HMAC Auth: Cryptographically signed requests for production deployments
• Admin Dashboard + Prometheus Metrics included

Stress-tested at 40 concurrent workers processing 2,000 jobs with 99% success rate, 13.6 jobs/sec throughput, and zero database lock-outs.

A Python SDK is available (pip install intent-bus), but the protocol is simple enough to use with pure bash and curl.

Best for: indie developers, home lab automation, cross-device scripting, and side projects that need execution guarantees without infrastructure overhead.

This is the tool you reach for before you need Redis not after. If your workload exceeds a few hundred jobs per minute or requires horizontal scaling across multiple servers, use a dedicated message broker like Redis or RabbitMQ. Intent Bus is intentionally minimal.