Message queues with RabbitMQ

Some brief notes from playing around with RabbitMQ. This is also a handy opportunity to further test the GitHub to WordPress integration before I post some longer code!

Things are easy on the Mac since homebrew, though sometimes the magic goes wrong.

rabbitmq is available through homebrew, install it the usual way:

brew install rabbitmq

Part-way through installing the dependencies, I got the error:

Linking /usr/local/Cellar/erlang/R15B01… Warning: Could not link erlang. Unlinking…

Turns out (from running ‘brew doctor‘) that some of my /usr/local directories belonged to root, so I fixed it with:

chown -R myuser:admin /usr/local/share/man

Followed by:

brew link erlang

Then you need pip, in order to install pika.

easy_install pip

(I think I got easy_install from installing the homebrew python; python seems infested with install tools; see stackoverflow’s why use pip over easy_install for information on old and busted versus new hotness).

So pip is there, next we install the actual python library for messaging:

sudo pip install pika==0.9.5

And then you’re good to go. Tutorial 1 code follows. Remember to start RabbitMQ before running either of these by doing:

rabbitmq-server

The receiver:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import pika

connection = pika.BlockingConnection(pika.ConnectionParameters(
               'localhost'))
channel = connection.channel()
channel.queue_declare(queue='hello')

print ' [*] Waiting for messages. To exit press CTRL+C'

def callback(ch, method, properties, body):
    print " [x] Received %r" % (body,)

channel.basic_consume(callback,
                      queue='hello',
                      no_ack=True)

channel.start_consuming()

The sender:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import pika

connection = pika.BlockingConnection(pika.ConnectionParameters(
               'localhost'))
channel = connection.channel()
channel.queue_declare(queue='hello')
channel.basic_publish(exchange='',
                      routing_key='hello',
                      body='Hello World!')
print " [x] Sent 'Hello World!'"
connection.close()

And that’s it.