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

Question

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.

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        |
+-------------+----------+---------------+---------------------------------------+---------------+------------------+------------+-------------+

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

you can use RabbitMQ API to get count or messages :

/api/queues/vhost/name/get

Get messages from a queue. (This is not an HTTP GET as it will alter the state of the queue.) You should post a body looking like:

{"count":5,"requeue":true,"encoding":"auto","truncate":50000}

count controls the maximum number of messages to get. You may get fewer messages than this if the queue cannot immediately provide them.

requeue determines whether the messages will be removed from the queue. If requeue is true they will be requeued - but their redelivered flag will be set. encoding must be either "auto" (in which case the payload will be returned as a string if it is valid UTF-8, and base64 encoded otherwise), or "base64" (in which case the payload will always be base64 encoded). If truncate is present it will truncate the message payload if it is larger than the size given (in bytes). truncate is optional; all other keys are mandatory.

Please note that the publish / get paths in the HTTP API are intended for injecting test messages, diagnostics etc - they do not implement reliable delivery and so should be treated as a sysadmin's tool rather than a general API for messaging.

http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-management/raw-file/rabbitmq_v3_1_3/priv/www/api/index.html

If you want multiple messages from a queue, say 10 messages, the command to use is:

rabbitmqadmin get queue=<QueueName> ackmode=ack_requeue_true count=10

If you don't want the messages requeued, just change ackmode to ack_requeue_false.

a bit late to this, but yes rabbitmq has a build in tracer that allows you to see the incomming messages in a log. When enabled, you can just tail -f /var/tmp/rabbitmq-tracing/.log (on mac) to watch the messages.

the detailed discription is here http://www.mikeobrien.net/blog/tracing-rabbitmq-messages