RabbitMQ - purge a queue from all of its unacked messages

Question

I have thousands of unacked messages in my dev environment which I can\'t restart.
Is there a way to remove (purge) all messages even if they are unacknowledged?

Answer 1

You have to make consumer ack them (or nack) and only after that they will be removed. Alternatively you can shutdown consumers and purge the queue completely.

If you are looking for some way to purge all unacked messages - there are no such feature nor in AMQP protocol neither in RabbitMQ.

It looks like your consumer is the cause of the problem, so you have to adjust it (rewrite) to release message immediately after it processed or failed.