Deleting queues in RabbitMQ

Question

I have a few queues running with RabbitMQ. A few of them are of no use now, how can I delete them? Unfortunately I had not set the auto_delete option.

If I set it now, will it be deleted?

Is there a way to delete those queues now?

Solution 1

If you do not care about the data in management database; i.e. users, vhosts, messages etc., and neither about other queues, then you can reset via commandline by running the following commands in order:

WARNING: In addition to the queues, this will also remove any users and vhosts, you have configured on your RabbitMQ server; and will delete any persistent messages

rabbitmqctl stop_app
rabbitmqctl reset
rabbitmqctl start_app

The rabbitmq documentation says that the reset command:

Returns a RabbitMQ node to its virgin state.

Removes the node from any cluster it belongs to, removes all data from the management database, such as configured users and vhosts, and deletes all persistent messages.

So, be careful using it.

Solution 2

import pika

connection = pika.BlockingConnection(pika.ConnectionParameters(
               'localhost'))
channel = connection.channel()

channel.queue_delete(queue='queue-name')

connection.close()

Install pika package as follows

$ sudo pip install pika==0.9.8

The installation depends on pip and git-core packages, you may need to install them first.

On Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip git-core

On Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools git-core
$ sudo easy_install pip

On Windows: To install easy_install, run the MS Windows Installer for setuptools

> easy_install pip
> pip install pika==0.9.8

Solution 3

In RabbitMQ versions > 3.0, you can also utilize the HTTP API if the rabbitmq_management plugin is enabled. Just be sure to set the content-type to 'application/json' and provide the vhost and queue name:

I.E. Using curl with a vhost 'test' and queue name 'testqueue':

$ curl -i -u guest:guest -H "content-type:application/json" -XDELETE http://localhost:15672/api/queues/test/testqueue
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Server: MochiWeb/1.1 WebMachine/1.9.0 (someone had painted it blue)
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:37:48 GMT
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 0

Solution 4

There is rabbitmqadmin which is nice to work from console.

If you ssh/log into server where you have rabbit installed, you can download it from:

http://{server}:15672/cli/rabbitmqadmin

and save it into /usr/local/bin/rabbitmqadmin

Then you can run

rabbitmqadmin -u {user} -p {password} -V {vhost} delete queue name={name}

Usually it requires sudo.

If you want to avoid typing your user name and password, you can use config

rabbitmqadmin -c /var/lib/rabbitmq/.rabbitmqadmin.conf -V {vhost} delete queue name={name}

All that under assumption that you have file ** /var/lib/rabbitmq/.rabbitmqadmin.conf** and have bare minumum

hostname = localhost
port = 15672
username = {user}
password = {password}

EDIT: As of comment from @user299709, it might be helpful to point out that user must be tagged as 'administrator' in rabbit. (https://www.rabbitmq.com/management.html)

Solution 5

A short summary for quick queue deletion with all default values from the host that is running RMQ server:

curl -O http://localhost:15672/cli/rabbitmqadmin
chmod u+x rabbitmqadmin
./rabbitmqadmin delete queue name=myQueueName

To delete all queues matching a pattern in a given vhost (e.g. containing 'amq.gen' in the root vhost):

rabbitmqctl -p / list_queues | grep 'amq.gen' | cut -f1 -d$'\t' | xargs -I % ./rabbitmqadmin -V / delete queue name=%

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