Get Started with RabbitMQ

The links listed below highlight some of our favourite content on this site and the web that will help you get started with messaging and RabbitMQ.

For even more you can explore RabbitMQ links on del.icio.us.

If you feel we have missed something please feel free to suggest more links.

Overviews and introductions

• Alexis' Introduction to RabbitMQ
  Alexis' presentation at Thoughtworks 'London Geek Night', May 2009, where he introduces RabbitMQ “An open source message broker that just works”.
• Introduction to AMQP and Messaging with RabbitMQ
  Presentation by Dmitriy Samovskiy on slideshare.net. Good primer on AMQP messaging concepts and RabbitMQ in general.
• The RabbitMQ Team's Introduction to RabbitMQ and AMQP
  A video of the RabbitMQ team presenting their Tech Talks at Google London, Oct 2008. Alexis explains what is meant by messaging and why you might need a messaging broker. Matthias provides a technical overview of the RabbitMQ broker and why Erlang was the right choice to implement it. Tony then discusses the future of RabbitMQ and AMQP with a focus on messaging at internet scale.
• A technical look at RabbitMQ and Erlang
  Matthias' slides from a talk at FITEclub in 2009 where he presents a technical overview of RabbitMQ
• Getting Started with AMQP and RabbitMQ
  Article on infoq.com by Joern Barthel that provides an excellent discussion the AMQ model and its implementation in RabbitMQ. Lots of code examples are provided in Ruby.
• RabbitMQ: python and ruby staring at the looking glass
  A slide show from Paolo Negri that offers an excellent introduction to the AMQP model and RabbitMQ with code samples in python and ruby. He explores the different routing models available and goes on to explain a number of use cases and some common messaging patterns, including pubsub.
• The Attention Deficit Disorder Guide to RabbitMQ
  Blog post for those who want to get started with RabbitMQ quickly and easily. Assumes you know the basics about messaging and AMQP.
• RabbitMQ and Messaging in General
  Slides from a presentation by Lenz Gschwendtner at erlounge in Wellington, July 2009. Another great introduction.
• Rabbits and Warrens
  Blog post. Provides and excellent introduction to messaging, RabbitMQ, AMQP and using them with Python. Well worth a read for ophidians and non-ophidians alike.
• Wikipedia on AMQP
  Read all about AMQP including the origins of the protocol, the AMQP model and the other specifications that cover the same or similar space as AMQP.
• Databases Suck for Messaging
  Slides from presentation given by Alexis at Oxford Geek Night, May 2009. Examination of why messaging architectures beat database polling for pubsub.
• RabbitMQ Internal Architecture
  Talk by Tony Garnock-Jones at Google London, May 2009. Explains the internals of RabbitMQ and how RabbitMQ can be used in federation and achieving redundancy for high availability.
• RabbitMQ on del.icio.us
  We present a list of useful searches on the social bookmarking site.

Specific Configurations

We support numerous operating system platforms. RabbitMQ is available for numerous Linux and Unix formats - see the full list on our download page. RabbitMQ is available as a Windows package where it can be run as a service. RabbitMQ installs have been created by the community for OpenSolaris, MacOSX, BSD and Gentoo. Please contact us if you cannot find what you need.

• Java development:
  • Java client
  • Java API-guide
  • RabbitMQ Java Client for Beginners
  • Java JMS
  • OSGI
  • Spring Framework code: AMQP/Spring and Spring-RabbitMQ
  • amqp-relay
    A simple service to relay all messages from a topic exchange to another RabbitMQ broker instance.
  • RabbitMQ Java development on del.icio.us
• Ruby development:
  • client overview
  • Ruby/EventMachine AMQP client
  • JRuby client
  • Bunny, a synchronous AMQP client
  • Lizzy, a lightweight agent system using RabbitMQ from Ruby
  • Google ruby-amqp group
  • Nanite self assembling fabric of ruby daemons
  • Rabbitbal a reverse proxy for Rails (as well as other web frameworks, not necessarily limited to Ruby)
  • Workling now supports RabbitMQ
  • RabbitMQ with Passenger and other frameworks
  • Rails and RubyCocoa demo application shown as part of a presentation about Messaging/RabbitMQ at the Melbourne Ruby group
  • El Conejo Mensajero (The Rabbit Messenger)
    A presentation (in English) by Joshua Sierles of 37signals giving an overview of RabbitMQ and listing lots of uses cases, mostly in Ruby
  • Bits, Bytes and Bobs
    A video introduction and review of best practices for dealing with binary data in Ruby with Memcached and RabbitMQ
  • RabbitMQ on Ruby Reflector
    Posts about RabbitMQ on the Ruby social news website
  • RabbitMQ Ruby development on del.icio.us
• Python development:
  • Introduction
  • client library code
  • txAMQP: Twisted AMQP
  • Messaging with txAMQP, a tutorial
  • Orbited, JavaScript/HTML socket in the browser
  • Carrot, easy RabbitMQ messaging queue support for Django and pure Python
  • Celery, a distributed task queue for Django and pure Python
  • Canonical Voices on AMQP
    A great series of tutorial articles by Canonical covering AMQP, RabbitMQ and txAMQP.
  • RabbitMQ Python development on del.icio.us
• .Net development:
  • Overview of .Net development
  • .NET Client Library User Guide
  • .NET NServiceBus client
  • RabbitMQ .Net development on del.icio.us
• PHP:
  • php-amqp - a client developed and used by StudiVZ, originally based on RabbitMQ-C
  • php-rabbit
  • php-amqplib a port of py-amqplib
  • RabbitMQ PHP development on del.icio.us
• Perl development:
  • Code for Net::AMQP
  • POE::Component::Client::AMQP
  • Net::RabbitMQ
  • RabbitFoot
  • RabbitMQ Perl development on del.icio.us
• Web messaging:
  • as3-amqp
    an AMQP client library in AS3 for Flex and Flash
  • hxamqp
    a port of as3-amqp to haXe
  • Integrating Flex and RabbitMQ using STOMP
    describes how to get Flex/Flash applications talking to RabbitMQ using STOMP
  • amqp-js
    A native AMQP library for Javascript that provides low-latency message queuing without using HTTP.
  • rabbithub
    an implementation of Google Pubsubhubbub for HTTP web push
  • PubSubHubbub on Ruby Reflector
    Posts about PubSubHubbub with only a mild Ruby bias
  • We provide plugins that expose a JSON/RPC endpoint and AMQP-over-HTTP binding for interacting with RabbitMQ over HTTP
  • node-amqp
    Node.js and RabbitMQ
• Experimental RabbitMQ-C client. You can also try this community C Client, and also a port of this client to d
• Erlang development
  • Introducing the Erlang AMQP client
  • Erlang examples
  • CouchDB
  • See also RabbitMQ Couch Relay
• Lisp development:
  • de.setf.amqp a Common Lisp client library for AMQP
  • CL-RABBIT an interface from LispWorks to RabbitMQ
  • RabbitMQ Lisp development on del.icio.us
• RabbitMQ on OpenVMS
  A port of RabbitMQ to the OpenVMS operating system.
• Stomp
• XMPP adaptor. See also "rabbiter", an experiment in decentralised microblogging
• Scala/Lift
• RabbitMQ and Scala - a popular tutorial and screencast that should be of interest for users of other languages too.
• CL-RABBIT, an interface from LispWorks to RabbitMQ
• rabbitmq-memcached
  A memcached adapter for RabbitMQ that allows you use the memcache protocol to get or publish a message from or to RabbitMQ.
• amqp-utils
  Command line utils for interacting with an AMQP based queue.
• amqp-relay
  A simple service to relay all messages from a topic exchange to another RabbitMQ broker instance. Think of Shovel, just in Scala.
• RabbitCage
  An AMQP firewall which allows you to restrict user access to RabbitMQ using ACLs.
• pg_amqp
  An AMQP extension for PostgreSQL.
• Fudge Messaging Format
  Fudge is a data encoding system that is hierarchical, typesafe, binary and self-describing. It works with HTTP, JMS and AMQP.
• amqpfs
  AMQP file system interface
• RabbitMQ Clients on del.icio.us
  More links to various client configurations on the social bookmarking site.

Cloud Configurations

• Generating Thousands of PDFs on EC2 with Ruby
  Describes how it is possible to leverage the cloud and RabbitMQ to scale-out a massive PDF generation task.
• Replacing Amazon SQS with something faster and cheaper
  Illustrates the use of RabbitMQ as a alternative to SQS for message queuing on AWS.
• Idiot's Guide to Linux on Amazon EC2
  Walk through of how to set up Ubuntu for use with RabbitMQ on AWS.
• Run RabbitMQ on EC2
  Describes how to get started with RabbitMQ on Amazon's EC2.
• RabbitMQ Cloud Use Cases on del.icio.us
  More links to cloud use cases at delicious.com.

Management and Monitoring

Management and monitoring tools are provided by RabbitMQ and several new community tools have appeared for 'dashboard' access to core management functionality. Please treat these as experimental and send feedback to the list.

• Cony
  A HTTP based service written in Python for providing insight into running RabbitMQ processes.
• Trixx
  An administration and monitoring tool written in Clojure so available for all languages that run on JVM.
• Alice and Wonderland
  Provide RESTful administration and monitoring of RabbitMQ nodes and a WebUI. Please read the release notes first.
• Chef Cookbook
  Ben Black's cookbook for managing RabbitMQ with Chef.
• RabbitMQ Status Plugin
  A plugin for RabbitMQ that provides a status page over HTTP showing memory, file descriptors and Erlang PIDS usage. You can also see basic information about connections and queues.
• Rabbitmq SNMP Plugin
  An experimental RabbitMQ plugin to provide SNMP statistics, developed by Scott Brooks. It includes the ability to trace message delivery to queues so that you can pull the total number of messages delivered.
• Monitoring RabbitMQ with Zabbix
  A simple example of how to configure Zabbix (an open source monitoring and graphing tool) to keep track of the number of messages pending delivery and the total number of queues.
• Humpty
  A Sinatra/Ruby application to administer RabbitMQ over REST (via alice) and AMQP.
• RabbitMQ Management and RabbitMQ Monitoring on del.icio.us
  More links to what others are doing to manage and monitor RabbitMQ.

Messaging Patterns and Common Scenarios

• Using RabbitMQ Beyond Queuing
  Dmitriy Samovskiy blogs about how RabbitMQ can be used beyond simple queuing and pubsub. Gets you started on the path to "achieve a distributed messaging nirvana".
• Advanced Messaging & Routing with AMQP
  Ilya Grigorik explains how to get started with AMQP in Ruby and provides some advanced AMQP recipes for a variety of messaging use cases.
• RabbitMQ, Celery and Django
  Robert Pogorzelski gives an excellent demonstration of how RabbitMQ and Celery can be used with Python to build an asynchronous, distributed task queue for your web application.
• Common Messaging Patterns (.NET Client Library User Guide)
  Whether or not you use .NET, section 3 of this guide describes ways of working with AMQP and a number common messaging patterns and interaction styles.
• Listening to the System
  Blog post from Ben Hyde examining some ideas how topic routing in AMQP is a good solution for building a message hub for real-time monitoring.
• Integration with Graphite
  Tools written in Python that facilitate sending data to Graphite via RabbitMQ rather than connecting directly via TCP. Demonstrates how the AMQP model decouples produces and consumers of data.
• Drizzle replication using RabbitMQ
  Marcus Erikkson has implemented a transaction log replicator for Drizzle using RabbitMQ as the transport. (See also the updated post and the follow up Better replication from Drizzle to Cassandra.)
• Messaging Patterns on del.icio.us
  See more links to articles on messaging patterns at delicious.com.

Specific Use Cases and Examples

• Unibet [PDF 10.3 MB]
  Stefan Norberg's presentation on use of RabbitMQ and Kaazing and Terracotta for European scale real time betting at Unibet.
• NASA's NEBULA Cloud Computing Platform
  Overview of how NASA are using RabbitMQ in their Nebula SaaS platform. Please also see this interview with The Register and these slides from Chris C. Kemp, the CIO of NASA Ames Research Center, and the thought-leader behind the NEBULA project.
• Application of RabbitMQ at the BBC
  Video of a talk by Mike Bridgen at Google London, May 2009, where he illustrates how RabbitMQ can be used within a real world application integrating the news feeds at the BBC.
• Untangling the BBC's data feeds
  More on the use of RabbitMQ at the BBC on Mike Bridgen's blog.
• RabbitMQ at Smarkets
  Video and slides of Hunter Morris' tech talk at Erlang Factory, London, July 2009 explaining how Smarkets use RabbitMQ in their backend stack.
• Soocial.com run RabbitMQ on Amazon EC2
  Soocial.com provide an address book and contact management solution running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. They use RabbitMQ as their message bus to move data between their service and mobile devices.
• Use Cases on del.icio.us
  See more links to articles on RabbitMQ use cases at delicious.com.

Going Further

• Advanced Message Queuing Protocol
  More information on the open standard from the AMQP working group.
• RabbitMQ Source Code Repository
  Browse the source.
• HOWTO: Build Your Own AMQP Client
  Gives implementers an overview of the considerations that may influence design decisions in their target language.
• HOWTO: Build a RabbitMQ Management Console
  Walk through of how you might build a RabbitMQ management tool.
• RabbitMQ's Protocol Code Generator
  Browse the source code used to auto-generate AMQP base classes from the protocol specification.

Blogs, Forums and Social

• LShift's Blogs
  Read the blogs of the developers behind RabbitMQ.
• Ben's Blogs
  Ben is a developer at LShift and is a contributor to the RabbitMQ project.
• Dmitry's Blogs
  Dmitry is the author of rabbitbal, a reverse proxy for Rails and other frameworks, and blogs a lot about RabbitMQ.
• Of Bunny and AMQP
  The blog of Chris Duncan, author the the Bunny AMQP client for Ruby. Good place to look if you're using AMQP with Ruby.
• Daniel DeLeo's Blog: Kallistec
  Daniel is the author of Qusion - "an AMQP made-easy" library for Ruby. He regularly blogs on a variety of subjects including AMQP, RabbitMQ and Ruby.
• Read what people are saying about RabbitMQ on Twitter
• Get the latest buzz about RabbitMQ on Addict-o-matic
• Join our mailing list (or see the archived messages)
• Talk to us on irc.freenode.net #rabbitmq (or see the logs) You can use this web interface to freenode if you don't have an IRC client installed.

Books and Print Articles

• AMQP with RabbitMQ
  An article in the Railsway Magazine, Issue 1, 2010: Messaging in Ruby with the AMQP broker RabbitMQ
• Distributed programming with Ruby
  See the chapter on 'Implementing comprehensive enterprise messaging with RabbitMQ and AMQP'.

General Posts

• Can AMQP break IBM's monopoly on middleware: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
  Three part series from Open Enterprise on messaging middleware and AMQP. Includes an interview with RabbitMQ’s very own Alexis Richardson.
• The potential for AMQP in financial services
  Datamonitor talk about the five user patterns for AMQP messaging and how they might be applied in financial services.
• AMQP will play a crucial role in the future of complex event processing
  Mark Palmer, CEO of StreamBase, predicts that interoperability between AMQP-enabled systems - particularly RabbitMQ - will play a major role in the evolution of innovative event-based processing stacks.
• You Might Need Messaging If...
  A short presentation from Bob Pasker on what messaging systems are for.
• Toward a commodity enterprise middleware
  Article in ACM Queue from June 2007 by John O'Hara, one of the orginal creators of AMQP. John discusses the origins of AMQP, how it came to be, and how you might go about integrating AMQP messaging with legacy middleware. The article entitled 'Toward a Commodity Enterprise Middleware' begins on the 50th page of the PDF.
• Advanced Message Queueing Protocol
  Presentation from Pranta Das from Cisco giving a good background on AMQP, an overview of the the new information model in AMQP 1.0 and some general use cases for AMQP messaging.
• Asynchronous Processing with Ruby on Rails
  Jon Dahl's presentation at Rail Conf 2008 describes why asynchronous processing is important and explains why messaging is useful here.
• Henry Ford & Event Driven Architecture
  Ilya Grigorik explains how to scale your application with events and suggests that a little "AMQP kung fu" may help.
• AMQP and Apache Qpid
  Microsoft discuss the challenges of enterprise messaging in a heterogeneous environment, and make a business case for AMQP, with Qpid as the example broker
• To AMQP or to XMPP, that is the question
  Blog post by Kenneth Kalmer comparing AMQP and XMPP as messaging protocols.
• A report of high performance tested by Intel in 2007
  Report of load testing of RabbitMQ conducted with Intel and an analysis by one of our team.
• AMQP 1.0 User’s Charter and Scope
  Details the requirements for AMQP 1.0 from the perspective of organisations investing in AMQP deployments.