Simple Python utilities to send and receive messages to/from RabbitMQ using the pika Python library.
Useful for basic performance testing and demonstrations of RabbitMQ and Pika usage.
Send 100 templated string messages:
./rabbit-send.py --exchange testexchange --message "hello @COUNT@" --count 100
Receive messages:
./rabbit-receive.py --exchange testexchange
Install in a new virtualenv
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
Start a local RabbitMQ server (admin site will be accessible at http://localhost:15672/)
docker compose up -d
Sending 100 messages at a rate of one per second to a new durable exchange called 'testexchange':
./rabbit-send.py --exchange testexchange --message "yo @COUNT@" --delay_ms 1000 --declare --durable --count 100
In another window, start consuming from 'testexchange':
./rabbit-receive.py --exchange testexchange --queue testqueue --durable
In RabbitMQ parlance, messages are sent to an "exchange". Normally you set an exchange up in the server before sending messages to it, but for convenience rabbit-send.py can also declare the exchange for you.
Send a message to an existing RabbitMQ exchange "testexchange"
$ rabbit-send.py --exchange testexchange --message "hello"
Send the contents of the file "message.txt" (prefix with "@" for filename)
$ rabbit-send.py --exchange testexchange --message @message.txt
Send a message to a new RabbitMQ exchange which will be declared automatically use the --declare option
$ rabbit-send.py --exchange testexchange --declare --message "hello"
Use a different exchange type ("direct" is the default value but here we choose "topic" instead)
$ rabbit-send.py --exchange testexchange --declare --type topic --message "hello"
Send 1000 messages ("hello 1", "hello 2", ...) at the rate of 10 per second
$ rabbit-send.py --exchange testexchange --message "hello @COUNT@" --count 1000 --delay_ms 100
Use --routing_key to specify a routing key.
To see all options run
$ rabbit-send.py --help
Listen for messages on an existing Rabbit queue "testqueue" (use this for round-robin type messaging)
./rabbit-receive.py --queue testqueue
Listen for messages on an existing exchange "testexchange" (creates an anonymous queue and binds it to the exchange so you can use this for pub-sub type messaging):
./rabbit-receive.py --exchange testexchange
Create and bind a new queue called "testqueue" to an existing exchange "testexchange" and listen for messages on that queue:
./rabbit-receive.py --exchange testexchange --queue testqueue
Consume 1000 messages at the rate of 10 per second
./rabbit-receive.py --exchange testexchange --count 1000 --delay_ms 100
Use --routing_key to specify a routing key.
Use the --count X and --delay_ms Y arguments to send/consume X messages with a delay of Y milliseconds in between each message.
Note that if the magic string "@COUNT@" occurs in your message body, it will be replaced by the index of the current message.
Run docker compose up -d in this project's directory to start a rabbit server.
The RabbitMQ Admin UI is available at http://localhost:15672/.
To list exchanges and queues (you'll have none initially) you can run the rabbitmqctl tool inside the container:
docker compose exec rabbitmq rabbitmqctl list_exchanges
docker compose exec rabbitmq rabbitmqctl list_queues
You can also fetch the rabbitmqadmin python utility from the running container which you can then use
to administer the server (your host machine will require python of course).
curl -o ./rabbitmqadmin localhost:15672/cli/rabbitmqadmin && chmod +x ./rabbitmqadmin
Use the admin utility to create an exchange (in this case with type "topic")
./rabbitmqadmin declare exchange --vhost=/ name=testexchange type=topic
A way to automate the configuration of a RabbitMQ docker container is to place the Rabbit MQ server definitions JSON on your local file system and then bind mount that into the container. This ensures the server creates your exchanges etc. at boot up time.