oban-designer

What This Skill Does

The oban-designer skill is an expert Elixir agent tool designed to streamline the creation and management of background processing workflows using the Oban library. It automates the generation of worker modules, provides architectural guidance on queue sizing, and helps configure complex features such as exponential backoff, cron-based scheduling, and uniqueness constraints. By standardizing the boilerplate required for reliable job processing, the agent ensures that your Elixir application remains performant and fault-tolerant under heavy load.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/gchapim/oban-designer Ensure your project already has the oban dependency in your mix.exs file and the necessary Ecto migrations applied to your database to support job persistence.

Use Cases

• Asynchronous Mailers: Offload email delivery from the request-response cycle to a dedicated queue to prevent latency.
• Recurring Scheduled Tasks: Set up automated reporting, database cleanup, or periodic system health checks using the Cron plugin.
• Third-Party Integrations: Implement reliable webhook delivery with custom retry strategies to handle external API downtime.
• Resource-Heavy Processing: Move CPU-intensive tasks like image resizing or video transcoding into specific queues with limited concurrency to protect system resources.
• Distributed Task Coordination: Use unique jobs to ensure that a task (like processing a payment or sending a notification) is only performed once, even if requested multiple times.

Example Prompts

1. "Create an Oban worker named ProcessVideo that runs in the :media queue with a max retry count of 3 and uses a linear backoff strategy."
2. "I need to configure a recurring cron job in config.exs that triggers MyApp.Workers.SyncCatalog every Monday at 3 AM."
3. "How should I configure my Oban queues to handle a sudden spike in webhook traffic without crashing my primary database connection pool?"

Tips & Limitations

• Always set max_attempts: Avoid infinite retry loops by explicitly defining limits in your worker module.
• Monitor queue saturation: Use the Oban.Web dashboard alongside this skill to visualize real-time throughput.
• Database Constraints: Remember that Oban relies on PostgreSQL. High job volume requires proper indexing of the oban_jobs table to maintain performance.
• Idempotency: Always ensure your perform/1 function is idempotent, as background jobs may occasionally run more than once during network partitions.