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 need to put messages back into the queue before you can purge them:

• close the channel
• close the connection (the script doesn't work for me)

As an alternative, this doesn't require to wait:

• delete and recreate the queue
• restart the server

Answer 2

If you want to clear the contents of the queue, then you can use the AMQP method queue.purge: There is queue purge in AMQP: http://www.rabbitmq.com/amqp-0-9-1-reference.html#queue.purge

You could do similar using the management plugin.