NestJS Microservices with RabbitMQ — Patterns That Scale

NestJS has first-class support for RabbitMQ via the @nestjs/microservices package. But production use requires more than the basic setup.

Message routing

Use direct exchanges with routing keys matching service names. This lets you add consumers without changing message producers.

Error handling

Dead-letter queues with TTL-based retry. Three retries with exponential backoff, then move to a DLQ for manual inspection. Never lose a message.

Schema validation

Validate every message at the transport boundary with class-validator. A malformed message shouldn't crash a consumer — reject it early and log the details.