How to Implement Priority Queues in RabbitMQ/pika

Question

I am looking to implement a priority queue with RabbitMQ. The mailing list recommends to use multiple queues, each queue representing a different priority level.

My question is, how do you poll multiple queues in some prioritized order using pika (or possibly some other python library)?

Answer 1

The accepted answer is outdated. From rabbitmq 3.5.0 there's native support for priority queues:

RabbitMQ has priority queue implementation in the core as of version 3.5.0. Any queue can be turned into a priority one using client-provided optional arguments

It's also available as of pika 1.1.0

class pika.spec.BasicProperties(content_type=None, content_encoding=None, headers=None, delivery_mode=None, priority=None, correlation_id=None, reply_to=None, expiration=None, message_id=None, timestamp=None, type=None, user_id=None, app_id=None, cluster_id=None)

The code using this feature might look as follows:

channel.basic_publish(properties=pika.BasicProperties(priority=your_priority),
                      exchange=...,
                      routing_key=...,
                      body=...)