Work queue for task distribution in RabbitMQ - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Work queue for task distribution

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple task distribution system using RabbitMQ. Multiple workers will receive tasks from a queue to share the workload evenly.

🎯 Goal: Create a RabbitMQ work queue named task_queue. Write a producer script that sends 5 tasks with specific messages to the queue. Then write a consumer script that receives and prints each task message.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a durable queue named task_queue

Producer sends 5 messages: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, Task 5

Consumer receives messages from task_queue and prints them

Use manual message acknowledgments in the consumer

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Work queues are used in real systems to distribute tasks like image processing, email sending, or data analysis among multiple worker machines.

💼 Career

Understanding work queues and message brokers like RabbitMQ is essential for DevOps engineers and backend developers to build scalable and reliable distributed systems.

1

Create a durable queue named task_queue

Write a Python script that connects to RabbitMQ on localhost and declares a durable queue named task_queue. Use the pika library and set durable=True when declaring the queue.

RabbitMQ

# Your code here to connect and declare the durable queue 'task_queue'

Need a hint?

Use pika.BlockingConnection to connect and channel.queue_declare with durable=True.

2

Send 5 tasks to the task_queue

Add code to the script to send 5 messages: 'Task 1', 'Task 2', 'Task 3', 'Task 4', and 'Task 5' to the task_queue. Make sure to mark messages as persistent by setting delivery_mode=2 in BasicProperties.

RabbitMQ

import pika

connection = pika.BlockingConnection(pika.ConnectionParameters('localhost'))
channel = connection.channel()
channel.queue_declare(queue='task_queue', durable=True)

# Your code here to send 5 persistent messages 'Task 1' to 'Task 5'

connection.close()

Need a hint?

Use a for loop from 1 to 5 and channel.basic_publish with delivery_mode=2 for persistence.

3

Create a consumer to receive and print tasks

Write a Python script that connects to RabbitMQ, declares the same durable queue task_queue, and consumes messages. Use channel.basic_consume with a callback function that prints the received message body. Use manual acknowledgments by calling ch.basic_ack inside the callback.

RabbitMQ

# Your code here to connect, declare queue, and consume messages with manual ack

Need a hint?

Define a callback function that prints the message and calls basic_ack. Use channel.basic_consume with this callback.

4

Run the consumer and verify output

Run the consumer script to receive and print all 5 task messages sent earlier. The output should show:
Received Task 1
Received Task 2
Received Task 3
Received Task 4
Received Task 5

RabbitMQ

import pika

connection = pika.BlockingConnection(pika.ConnectionParameters('localhost'))
channel = connection.channel()
channel.queue_declare(queue='task_queue', durable=True)

def callback(ch, method, properties, body):
    print(f"Received {body.decode()}")
    ch.basic_ack(delivery_tag=method.delivery_tag)

channel.basic_consume(queue='task_queue', on_message_callback=callback)

print('Waiting for messages. To exit press CTRL+C')
channel.start_consuming()

# Run this script and observe the printed output

Need a hint?

Run the consumer script after the producer has sent messages. The output should print each task received.