Is it possible to view RabbitMQ message contents directly from the command line?

Solution 1:

You should enable the management plugin.

rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management

See here:

http://www.rabbitmq.com/plugins.html

And here for the specifics of management.

http://www.rabbitmq.com/management.html

Finally once set up you will need to follow the instructions below to install and use the rabbitmqadmin tool. Which can be used to fully interact with the system. http://www.rabbitmq.com/management-cli.html

For example:

rabbitmqadmin get queue=<QueueName> requeue=false

will give you the first message off the queue.

Solution 2:

Here are the commands I use to get the contents of the queue:

RabbitMQ version 3.1.5 on Fedora linux using https://www.rabbitmq.com/management-cli.html

Here are my exchanges:

eric@dev ~ $ sudo python rabbitmqadmin list exchanges
+-------+--------------------+---------+-------------+---------+----------+
| vhost |        name        |  type   | auto_delete | durable | internal |
+-------+--------------------+---------+-------------+---------+----------+
| /     |                    | direct  | False       | True    | False    |
| /     | kowalski           | topic   | False       | True    | False    |
+-------+--------------------+---------+-------------+---------+----------+

Here is my queue:

eric@dev ~ $ sudo python rabbitmqadmin list queues
+-------+----------+-------------+-----------+---------+------------------------+---------------------+--------+----------+----------------+-------------------------+---------------------+--------+---------+
| vhost |   name   | auto_delete | consumers | durable | exclusive_consumer_tag |     idle_since      | memory | messages | messages_ready | messages_unacknowledged |        node         | policy | status  |
+-------+----------+-------------+-----------+---------+------------------------+---------------------+--------+----------+----------------+-------------------------+---------------------+--------+---------+
| /     | myqueue  | False       | 0         | True    |                        | 2014-09-10 13:32:18 | 13760  | 0        | 0              | 0                       |rabbit@ip-11-1-52-125|        | running |
+-------+----------+-------------+-----------+---------+------------------------+---------------------+--------+----------+----------------+-------------------------+---------------------+--------+---------+

Cram some items into myqueue:

curl -i -u guest:guest http://localhost:15672/api/exchanges/%2f/kowalski/publish -d '{"properties":{},"routing_key":"abcxyz","payload":"foobar","payload_encoding":"string"}'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: MochiWeb/1.1 WebMachine/1.10.0 (never breaks eye contact)
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 17:46:59 GMT
content-type: application/json
Content-Length: 15
Cache-Control: no-cache

{"routed":true}

RabbitMQ see messages in queue:

eric@dev ~ $ sudo python rabbitmqadmin get queue=myqueue requeue=true count=10
+-------------+----------+---------------+---------------------------------------+---------------+------------------+------------+-------------+
| routing_key | exchange | message_count |                        payload        | payload_bytes | payload_encoding | properties | redelivered |
+-------------+----------+---------------+---------------------------------------+---------------+------------------+------------+-------------+
| abcxyz      | kowalski | 10            | foobar                                | 6             | string           |            | True        |
| abcxyz      | kowalski | 9             | {'testdata':'test'}                   | 19            | string           |            | True        |
| abcxyz      | kowalski | 8             | {'mykey':'myvalue'}                   | 19            | string           |            | True        |
| abcxyz      | kowalski | 7             | {'mykey':'myvalue'}                   | 19            | string           |            | True        |
+-------------+----------+---------------+---------------------------------------+---------------+------------------+------------+-------------+

Solution 3:

I wrote rabbitmq-dump-queue which allows dumping messages from a RabbitMQ queue to local files and requeuing the messages in their original order.

Example usage (to dump the first 50 messages of queue incoming_1):

rabbitmq-dump-queue -url="amqp://user:[email protected]:5672/" -queue=incoming_1 -max-messages=50 -output-dir=/tmp