Delete Queues In RabbitMQ

When using RabbitMQ (an excellent message broker for decoupling applications) you sometimes end up with queues you don’t want or need anymore. Deleting them is thankfully a straight-forward process but first-time users often don’t know how to do this.

Probably the easiest way to delete a queue is to use rabbitmqadmin which is supplied by RabbitMQ’s management plugin. Deleting a queue is as simple as running the following:

$ rabbitmqadmin delete queue name=queue_1
	queue deleted

Obviously, replace ‘queue_1’ with the name of the queue you want to delete :)

If you want to delete all the queues then you will need a list of them which can be generated like so:

$ rabbitmqadmin -f bash list queues name
	queue_1 queue_2 queue_3 queue_4

Then, simply run this one-liner:

$ for queue in `rabbitmqadmin -f bash list queues`; do echo $queue `rabbitmqadmin delete queue name=$queue`; done
	queue_1 queue deleted
	queue_2 queue deleted
	queue_3 queue deleted
	queue_4 queue deleted