Purge a queue in RabbitMQ

Question

I am using RabbitMQ for daily transactions. My consumers are .Net desktop applications deployed in multiple machines. Every day the transactions are pushed to queue within a certain time duration only. Beyond that there needs to be a hard stop on any new transaction. I have managed to stop sending new transaction to the queue. However, the existing transactions in the queue also needs to be flushed so that it is not sent to any consumer. I tried searching for this but did not get any solution for purging a queue except for two options-

• Delete and re-create the queue every day
• Stop all the consumers of the queue

Both of these approaches can be implemented but it requires significant amount of changes on my systems. I want to know if there is a better approach.

Answer 1

In C# you can purge a Queue like this

            ConnectionFactory factory = new ConnectionFactory();

            factory.HostName = "localhost";
            factory.UserName = "guest";
            factory.Password = "guest";

            using (var connection = factory.CreateConnection())
            {
                using (var channel = connection.CreateModel())
                {
                    channel.QueuePurge(queueName);
                }

            }

Answer 2

This blog article describes how to purge a queue in RabbitMQ in different ways.

rabbitmqadmin: The management plugin ships with a command line tool, rabbitmqadmin, which can perform the same actions as the web-based UI (the RabbitMQ management interface).

The script used to purge all messages in a single queue is:

$ rabbitmqadmin purge queue name=name_of_queue

HTTP API: The Rabbitmq Management plugin provides an HTTP-based API for management and monitoring of your RabbitMQ server.

curl -i -XDELETE https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST/api/queues/vhost/QUEUE_NAME/contents

Policy: Add a policy that matches the queue names with an max-lenght rule. A policy can be added by entering the Management Interface and then pressing the admin tab. (Don't forget to delete the policy after it has been applied.)