Dead Lettered Message Not Being Consumed in RabbitMQ and Node Using AMQP.Node

Question

I want to receive a message after a certain amount of time in one of my workers. I decided to go with Node and RabbitMQ after discovering so-called dead letter exchanges.

The message seems to get send to the queue in DeadExchange, but the consumer is never receiving the message after the elapsed time in the WorkQueue in the WorkExchange. Either the bindQueue is off, or the dead-letter'ing doesn't work?

I've tried a lot of different values now. Can someone please point out what I'm missing?

var amqp = require('amqplib');
var url = 'amqp://dev.rabbitmq.com';

amqp.connect(url).then(function(conn) {
    //Subscribe to the WorkQueue in WorkExchange to which the "delayed" messages get dead-letter'ed (is that a verb?) to.
    return conn.createChannel().then(function(ch) {
        return ch.assertExchange('WorkExchange', 'direct').then(function() {
            return ch.assertQueue('WorkQueue', {
                autoDelete: false,
                durable: true
            })
        }).then(function() {
            return ch.bindQueue('WorkQueue', 'WorkExchange', '');
        }).then(function() {
            console.log('Waiting for consume.');

            return ch.consume('WorkQueue', function(msg) {
                console.log('Received message.');
                console.log(msg.content.toString());
                ch.ack(msg);
            });
        });
    })
}).then(function() {
    //Now send a test message to DeadExchange to a random (unique) queue.
    return amqp.connect(url).then(function(conn) {
        return conn.createChannel();
    }).then(function(ch) {
        return ch.assertExchange('DeadExchange', 'direct').then(function() {
            return ch.assertQueue('', {
                arguments: {
                    'x-dead-letter-exchange': 'WorkExchange',
                    'x-message-ttl': 2000,
                    'x-expires': 10000
                }
            })
        }).then(function(ok) {
            console.log('Sending delayed message');

            return ch.sendToQueue(ok.queue, new Buffer(':)'));
        });
    })
}).then(null, function(error) {
    console.log('error\'ed')
    console.log(error);
    console.log(error.stack);
});

I'm using amqp.node (https://github.com/squaremo/amqp.node) which is amqplib in npm. Although node-amqp (https://github.com/postwait/node-amqp) seems to be so much more popular, it doesn't implement the full protocol and there are quite some outstanding issues regarding reconnecting.

dev.rabbitmq.com is running RabbitMQ 3.1.3.

Answer 1

This is a working code.When a message spends more than ttl in DeadExchange, it is pushed to WorkExchange. The key to success is defining the right routing key. The exchange-queue to which you wish to send post ttl, should be bounded with a routing key(note: not default), and 'x-dead-letter-routing-key' attributes value should match that route-key.

var amqp = require('amqplib');
var url = 'amqp://localhost';

amqp.connect(url).then(function(conn) {
    //Subscribe to the WorkQueue in WorkExchange to which the "delayed" messages get dead-letter'ed (is that a verb?) to.
    return conn.createChannel().then(function(ch) {
        return ch.assertExchange('WorkExchange', 'direct').then(function() {
            return ch.assertQueue('WorkQueue', {
                autoDelete: false,
                durable: true
            })
        }).then(function() {
            return ch.bindQueue('WorkQueue', 'WorkExchange', 'rk1');
        }).then(function() {
            console.log('Waiting for consume.');

            return ch.consume('WorkQueue', function(msg) {
                console.log('Received message.');
                console.log(msg.content.toString());
                ch.ack(msg);
            });
        });
    })
}).then(function() {
    //Now send a test message to DeadExchange to DEQ queue.
    return amqp.connect(url).then(function(conn) {
        return conn.createChannel();
    }).then(function(ch) {
        return ch.assertExchange('DeadExchange', 'direct').then(function() {
            return ch.assertQueue('DEQ', {
                arguments: {
                    'x-dead-letter-exchange': 'WorkExchange',
                    'x-dead-letter-routing-key': 'rk1',
                    'x-message-ttl': 15000,
                    'x-expires': 100000
                }
            })
        }).then(function() {
            return ch.bindQueue('DEQ', 'DeadExchange', '');
        }).then(function() {
            console.log('Sending delayed message');

            return ch.publish('DeadExchange', '', new Buffer("Over the Hills and Far Away!"));
        });
    })
}).then(null, function(error) {
    console.log('error\'ed')
    console.log(error);
    console.log(error.stack);
});