RabbitMQ non-blocking consumer

Question

I'm using RabbitMQ in Python to manage several queues between a producer and multiple consumers. In the example in RabbitMQ website (routing model), the consumers are blocked. It means that they stop on start_consuming() and execute the callback function every time there is a new "task" in the queue.

My question is: how can I implement my consumer in a way that he is still waiting for tasks (so, the callback function is called every time there is new things in the queue) but at the same time he can execute other work/code.

Thank you

Answer 1

Form FAQ:

Pika does not have any notion of threading in the code. If you want to use Pika with threading, make sure you have a Pika connection per thread, created in that thread. It is not safe to share one Pika connection across threads,

So lets create the connection inside the thread:

import pika


class PikaMassenger():

    exchange_name = '...'

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.conn = pika.BlockingConnection(pika.ConnectionParameters(host='localhost'))
        self.channel = self.conn.channel()
        self.channel.exchange_declare(
            exchange=self.exchange_name, 
            exchange_type='topic')

    def consume(self, keys, callback):
        result = self.channel.queue_declare('', exclusive=True)
        queue_name = result.method.queue
        for key in keys:
            self.channel.queue_bind(
                exchange=self.exchange_name, 
                queue=queue_name, 
                routing_key=key)

        self.channel.basic_consume(
            queue=queue_name, 
            on_message_callback=callback, 
            auto_ack=True)

        self.channel.start_consuming()


    def __enter__(self):
        return self


    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_value, traceback):
        self.conn.close()

def start_consumer():

    def callback(ch, method, properties, body):
        print(" [x] %r:%r consumed" % (method.routing_key, body))

    with PikaMassenger() as consumer:
        consumer.consume(keys=[...], callback=callback)


consumer_thread = threading.Thread(target=start_consumer)
consumer_thread.start()