RabbitMQ Config Generator

RabbitMQ has four built-in exchange types: Direct routes messages by exact routing key match (good for task queues). Topic routes by pattern matching using * (one word) and # (zero or more words) wildcards — great for pub/sub with namespaced topics. Fanout broadcasts to all bound queues regardless of routing key — useful for notifications and cache invalidation. Headers routes by message header attributes instead of routing key.

Durable queues and exchanges survive broker restarts. Non-durable (transient) resources are deleted when RabbitMQ restarts. For production use cases where losing messages is not acceptable, always use durable queues with persistent message delivery (delivery_mode: 2). Note that durability applies to the queue definition — messages themselves also need to be published as persistent to survive restarts.

A Dead Letter Exchange receives messages that cannot be processed — they've expired (exceeded TTL), been rejected, or the queue has exceeded its max-length limit. Set x-dead-letter-exchange on a queue to redirect failed messages to a DLX for later inspection, retry, or alerting. This is essential for building resilient message pipelines.

x-message-ttl sets the maximum time (in milliseconds) a message can stay in the queue before being discarded or dead-lettered. For example, 86400000 = 24 hours. Per-message TTL can also be set at publish time via the expiration property. If both are set, the shorter of the two applies.

x-max-length caps the number of messages in a queue. When the limit is reached, the oldest messages (head of queue) are dropped or dead-lettered to make room for new ones. This prevents unbounded queue growth in cases where consumers fall behind. You can also set x-max-length-bytes to cap by total byte size.

For JSON output: use the RabbitMQ Management API (POST /api/definitions) or the rabbitmqadmin CLI import command. For YAML: use it with your infrastructure-as-code tooling like Ansible or Terraform's RabbitMQ provider. In application code, use your client library's channel.exchangeDeclare(), channel.queueDeclare(), and channel.queueBind() methods.