QStash Delay - Upstash Documentation

When publishing a message, you can delay it for a certain amount of time before it will be delivered to your API. See the pricing table for more information

For free: The maximum allowed delay is 7 days.For pay-as-you-go: The maximum allowed delay is 1 year.For fixed pricing: The maximum allowed delay is Custom(you may delay as much as needed).

Relative Delay

Delay a message by a certain amount of time relative to the time the message was published. The format for the duration is <number><unit>. Here are some examples:

10s = 10 seconds
1m = 1 minute
30m = half an hour
2h = 2 hours
7d = 7 days

You can send this duration inside the Upstash-Delay header.

curl -XPOST \
    -H 'Authorization: Bearer XXX' \
    -H "Content-type: application/json" \
    -H "Upstash-Delay: 1m" \
    -d '{ "hello": "world" }' \
    'https://qstash.upstash.io/v2/publish/https://my-api...'

import { Client } from "@upstash/qstash";

const client = new Client({ token: "<QSTASH_TOKEN>" });
const res = await client.publishJSON({
  url: "https://my-api...",
  body: { hello: "world" },
  delay: 60,
});

from qstash import QStash

client = QStash("<QSTASH_TOKEN>")
client.message.publish_json(
    url="https://my-api...",
    body={
        "hello": "world",
    },
    headers={
        "test-header": "test-value",
    },
    delay="60s",
)

Upstash-Delay will get overridden by Upstash-Not-Before header when both are used together.

Absolute Delay

Delay a message until a certain time in the future. The format is a unix timestamp in seconds, based on the UTC timezone. You can send the timestamp inside the Upstash-Not-Before header.

curl -XPOST \
    -H 'Authorization: Bearer XXX' \
    -H "Content-type: application/json" \
    -H "Upstash-Not-Before: 1657104947" \
    -d '{ "hello": "world" }' \
    'https://qstash.upstash.io/v2/publish/https://my-api...'

import { Client } from "@upstash/qstash";

const client = new Client({ token: "<QSTASH_TOKEN>" });
const res = await client.publishJSON({
  url: "https://my-api...",
  body: { hello: "world" },
  notBefore: 1657104947,
});

from qstash import QStash

client = QStash("<QSTASH_TOKEN>")
client.message.publish_json(
    url="https://my-api...",
    body={
        "hello": "world",
    },
    headers={
        "test-header": "test-value",
    },
    not_before=1657104947,
)

Upstash-Not-Before will override the Upstash-Delay header when both are used together.

Delays in Schedules

Adding a delay in schedules is only possible via Upstash-Delay. The delay will affect the messages that will be created by the schedule and not the schedule itself. For example when you create a new schedule with a delay of 30s, the messages will be created when the schedule triggers but only delivered after 30 seconds.

​Relative Delay

​Absolute Delay

​Delays in Schedules

Relative Delay

Absolute Delay

Delays in Schedules