Delayed message delivery in RabbitMQ
UPD June 01, 2015: there is a plugin for this now.
A lot of developers use RabbitMQ message broker. It is quite mature but still lacks for some features that one may need. One of them is delayed message delivery: there is no way to send a message that will be delivered after a specified delay (it’s a limitation of AMQP protocol). Hopefully, there is a hack for this.
Let’s start from dead letters. A message can become “dead” by several reasons, such as rejection or TTL (time to live) expiration. RabbitMQ can deal with such messages by redirecting them to a particular exchange and routing key. We can use this ability to implement delayed delivery. We will create a special queue for holding delayed messages. This queue will not have any subscribers in order for messages to expire. After the expiration, messages will be passed to a destination exchange and routing key, just as planned.