Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite
by russellthehippo on 4/23/2026, 11:53:11 AM
https://github.com/russellromney/honker
Comments
by: russellthehippo
Hey HN, I built this. Honker adds cross-process NOTIFY/LISTEN to SQLite. You get push-style event delivery with single-digit millisecond latency without a damon/broker, using your existing SQLite file. A lot of pretty high-traffic applications are just Framework+SQLite+Litestream on a VPS now, so I wanted to bring a sixer to the "just use SQLite" party.<p>SQLite doesn't run a server like Postgres, so the trick is moving the polling source from interval queries on a SQLite connection to a lightweight stat(2) on the WAL file. Many small queries are efficient in SQLite (<a href="https://www.sqlite.org/np1queryprob.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.sqlite.org/np1queryprob.html</a>) so this isn't really a huge upgrade, but the cross-language result is pretty interesting to me - this is language agnostic as all you do is listen to the WAL file and call SQLite functions.<p>On top of the store/notify primitives, honker ships ephemeral pub/sub (like pg_notify), durable work queues with retries and dead-letter (like pg-boss/Oban), and event streams with per-consumer offsets. All three are rows in your app's existing .db file and can commit atomically with your business write. This is cool because a rollback drops both.<p>This used to be called litenotify/joblite but I bought honker.dev as a joke for my gf and I realized that every mq/task/worker have silly names: Oban, pg-boss, Huey, RabbitMQ, Celery, Sidekiq, etc. Thus a silly goose got its name.<p>Honker waddles the same path as these giants and honks into the same void.<p>Hopefully it's either useful to you or is amusing. Standard alpha software warnings apply.
4/23/2026, 12:14:20 PM
by: PunchyHamster
Wouldn't processes on same machine be able to use different IPCs that don't even touch file ? It's neat but I have feeling in vast majority of cases just passing address to one of the IPC methods would be faster and then SQLite itself would only be needed for the durable parts.
4/23/2026, 1:52:18 PM
by: Retr0id
Couldn't you use inotify (and/or some cross-platform wrapper) to watch for WAL changes without polling?
4/23/2026, 12:59:14 PM
by: ArielTM
kqueue/FSEvents is tempting here, but Darwin drops same-process notifications. If you've got a publisher and listener in the same process the listener just never fires. Nasty thing to chase. stat polling looks gross but it's the only thing that actually works everywhere.<p>What happens on WAL checkpoint? When the file shrinks back, does that trigger a wakeup, or does the poller filter size drops?
4/23/2026, 12:43:01 PM
by: 0x1da49
[dead]
4/23/2026, 1:29:32 PM
by: GangstaAgents
Interesting project. Clean idea and nice abstraction layer. Curious how you handle durability and concurrency under load, especially with SQLite as the base.
4/23/2026, 12:28:33 PM