[queue] Deleting queues in RabbitMQ

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?

I use this alias in .profile:

alias qclean="rabbitmqctl list_queues | python ~/bin/qclean.py"

where qclean.py has the following code:

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

queues = sys.stdin.readlines()[1:-1]
for x in queues:
    q = x.split()[0]
    print 'Deleting %s...' %(q)
    channel.queue_delete(queue=q)

connection.close()

Essentially, this is an iterative version of code of Shweta B. Patil.

Another option would be to enable the management_plugin and connect to it over a browser. You can see all queues and information about them. It is possible and simple to delete queues from this interface.

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

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

install

$ sudo rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management

and go to http://localhost:15672/#/queues if you are using localhost. the default password will be username: guest, password: guest and go to queues tab and delete the queue.

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=%

With the rabbitmq_management plugin installed you can run this to delete all the unwanted queues:

rabbitmqctl list_queues -p vhost_name |\
grep -v "fast\|medium\|slow" |\
tr "[:blank:]" " " |\
cut -d " " -f 1 |\
xargs -I {} curl -i -u guest:guest -H "content-type:application/json" -XDELETE http://localhost:15672/api/queues/<vhost_name>/{}

Let's break the command down:

rabbitmqctl list_queues -p vhost_name will list all the queues and how many task they have currently.

grep -v "fast\|medium\|slow" will filter the queues you don't want to delete, let's say we want to delete every queue without the words fast, medium or slow.

tr "[:blank:]" " " will normalize the delimiter on rabbitmqctl between the name of the queue and the amount of tasks there are

cut -d " " -f 1 will split each line by the whitespace and pick the 1st column (the queue name)

xargs -I {} curl -i -u guest:guest -H "content-type:application/json" -XDELETE http://localhost:15672/api/queues/<vhost>/{} will pick up the queue name and will set it into where we set the {} character deleting all queues not filtered in the process.

Be sure the user been used has administrator permissions.

You assert that a queue exists (and create it if it does not) by using queue.declare. If you originally set auto-delete to false, calling queue.declare again with autodelete true will result in a soft error and the broker will close the channel.

You need to use queue.delete now in order to delete it.

See the API documentation for details:

• Java Client queueDelete
• .NET Client queueDelete

If you use another client, you'll need to find the equivalent method. Since it's part of the protocol, it should be there, and it's probably part of Channel or the equivalent.

You might also want to have a look at the rest of the documentation, in particular the Geting Started section which covers a lot of common use cases.

Finally, if you have a question and can't find the answer elsewhere, you should try posting on the RabbitMQ Discuss mailing list. The developers do their best to answer all questions asked there.

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)

I've generalized Piotr Stapp's JavaScript/jQuery method a bit further, encapsulating it into a function and generalizing it a bit.

This function uses the RabbitMQ HTTP API to query available queues in a given vhost, and then delete them based on an optional queuePrefix:

function deleteQueues(vhost, queuePrefix) {
    if (vhost === '/') vhost = '%2F';  // html encode forward slashes
    $.ajax({
        url: '/api/queues/'+vhost, 
        success: function(result) {
            $.each(result, function(i, queue) {
                if (queuePrefix && !queue.name.startsWith(queuePrefix)) return true;
                $.ajax({
                    url: '/api/queues/'+vhost+'/'+queue.name, 
                    type: 'DELETE', 
                    success: function(result) { console.log('deleted '+ queue.name)}
                });
            });
        }
    });
};

Once you paste this function in your browser's JavaScript console while on your RabbitMQ management page, you can use it like this:

Delete all queues in '/' vhost

deleteQueues('/');

Delete all queues in '/' vhost beginning with 'test'

deleteQueues('/', 'test');

Delete all queues in 'dev' vhost beginning with 'foo'

deleteQueues('dev', 'foo');

Please use this at your own risk!

I did it different way, because I only had access to management webpage. I created simple "snippet" which delete queues in Javascript. Here it is:

function zeroPad(num, places) {
  var zero = places - num.toString().length + 1;
  return Array(+(zero > 0 && zero)).join("0") + num;
}
var queuePrefix = "PREFIX"
for(var i=0; i<255; i++){ 
   var queueid = zeroPad(i, 4);
   $.ajax({url: '/api/queues/vhost/'+queuePrefix+queueid, type: 'DELETE', success: function(result) {console.log('deleted '+queuePrefix+queueid)}});
}

All my queues was in format: PREFIX_0001 to PREFIX_0XXX

I was struggling with finding an answer that suited my needs of manually delete a queue in rabbigmq. I therefore think it is worth mentioning in this thread that it is possible to delete a single queue without rabbitmqadmin using the following command:

rabbitmqctl delete_queue <queue_name>

The management plugin (web interface) gives you a link to a python script. You can use it to delete queues. I used this pattern to remove a lot of queues:

python tmp/rabbitmqadmin --vhost=... --username=... --password=... list queues > tmp/q

vi tmp/q # remove all queues which you want to keep

cut -d' ' -f4 tmp/q| while read q; 
    do python tmp/rabbitmqadmin --vhost=... --username=... --password=... delete queue name=$q; 
done

Hopefully it might help someone.

I tried the above pieces of code but I did not do any streaming.

sudo rabbitmqctl list_queues | awk '{print $1}' > queues.txt; for line in $(cat queues.txt); do sudo rabbitmqctl delete_queue "$line"; done.

I generate a file that contains all the queue names and loops through it line by line to the delete them. For the loops, while read ... did not do it for me. It was always stopping at the first queue name.

Also, if you want to delete a single queue, the above solutions will help(python, Java ...) and also do sudo rabbitmqctl delete_queue queue_name. I am using rabbitmqctl instead of rabbitmqadmin.