Is TTL implemented in Pika?

Question

I'd like my queue to drop messages not processed within a certain time.

I already do this in the consumer by recording the publish time. However, in the case that no-one is subcribing, it would be better for the queue to simply drop stale messages.

Can I set a expiry time (TTL) in messages in Pika. The RabbitMQ docs talk about it but i don't see TTL references in the Pika docs.

Answer 1

You can set the per message TTL using the expiration flag on the BasicProperties object, as seen in the pika documentation here.

Using it would look something like this.

channel.basic_publish(
    exchange='',
    routing_key='hello_world',
    properties=pika.BasicProperties(
        expiration='60000',
    ),
    body='my message'
)

Keep in mind that the expiration policy is expressed using milliseconds as string, so 60000 would translate to 60 seconds.

You can read more about message based TTL and it's caveats here.