rabbitmq-rails

RabbitMQ in Rails

RabbitMQ is the right tool for complex routing (one publisher, many topologies of consumers), heterogeneous workers (Ruby + Python + Go all reading the same queue), and work distribution. Wrong tool when you need replay, long retention, or stream semantics — that's Kafka.

The opinion

Use bunny (synchronous AMQP client) for producing. Use sneakers for consuming long-running workers (it integrates with Rails). Always declare durable exchanges + queues + persistent messages. Acknowledge manually (manual_ack: true) after work succeeds — autoack drops messages on crash. Set a sane prefetch (10-50) per consumer. Use a dead-letter exchange for failures.

Counter-positions:

• Kafka for event streams with replay / fan-out / retention. RabbitMQ deletes messages after ack.
• Solid Queue / Sidekiq for in-app jobs. Don't pull in RabbitMQ for a delayed email.
• Redis Streams for lightweight Kafka-like patterns (see redis-streams-rails).

Setup

# Gemfile
gem "bunny", "~> 2.22"
gem "sneakers", "~> 2.12"

# config/initializers/rabbitmq.rb
RABBIT = Bunny.new(
  ENV.fetch("RABBITMQ_URL"),
  automatically_recover: true,
  network_recovery_interval: 5,
  threaded: true
)
RABBIT.start

at_exit { RABBIT.close }

# config/initializers/sneakers.rb
Sneakers.configure(
  amqp: ENV.fetch("RABBITMQ_URL"),
  daemonize: false,
  workers: 4,
  threads: 5,
  prefetch: 10,
  log: STDOUT
)
Sneakers.logger.level = Logger::INFO

Pattern 1: Publishing

# Long-lived publisher channel — opening a fresh channel per publish is an
# anti-pattern that exhausts broker channel limits at high publish rates.
class OrderEventPublisher
  CHANNEL = RABBIT.create_channel
  EXCHANGE = CHANNEL.topic("events.orders", durable: true)

  def self.publish(event_type:, payload:)
    EXCHANGE.publish(
      payload.to_json,
      routing_key: event_type,                   # e.g. "order.placed"
      persistent: true,                          # durable on disk
      content_type: "application/json",
      message_id: SecureRandom.uuid,             # idempotency aid for consumers
      timestamp: Time.current.to_i
    )
  end
end

# Usage
OrderEventPublisher.publish(
  event_type: "order.placed",
  payload: { order_id: 42, account_id: 7, total_cents: 12_500 }
)