I installed rabbitmqadmin
and was able to list all the exchanges and queues. How can I use rabbitmqadmin
or rabbitmqctl
to delete all the queues.
27 Answers
First, list your queues:
rabbitmqadmin list queues name
Then from the list, you'll need to manually delete them one by one:
rabbitmqadmin delete queue name='queuename'
Because of the output format, doesn't appear you can grep the response from list queues
. Alternatively, if you're just looking for a way to clear everything (read: reset all settings, returning the installation to a default state), use:
rabbitmqctl stop_app
rabbitmqctl reset # Be sure you really want to do this!
rabbitmqctl start_app
-
5to see all pending tasks in rabbitmq: `rabbitmqctl list_queues name messages messages_ready \ messages_unacknowledged` – Guillaume Vincent Oct 19 '13 at 13:32
-
Apologies @smartnut007, I've clarified the second portion of the answer with a disclaimer. – lukiffer May 22 '14 at 18:59
-
28just grabbing the empty queues. `rabbitmqctl list_queues | grep 0 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -I qn rabbitmqadmin delete queue name=qn` – au_stan Jun 24 '14 at 19:09
-
@austin 's receipt works perfectly. Just make sure you have root privilege before you run that. – Devy Jun 26 '14 at 22:37
-
4@au_stan That will delete all queues with a 0 in the name or the count. Might want to do `grep $'\t0'` or something. – woot Sep 14 '15 at 04:07
-
2Be aware that "rabbitmqctl reset" will reset *everything* back to the "factory settings". Any RabbitMQ users, virtual hosts, etc, that you have created will be blown away. – thoufek Mar 14 '14 at 19:38
-
Is the rabbitmqctl "reset" flavor supposed to be compatible with rabbitmq installed via Homebrew? Didn't seem to work work for me. I ended up using one of the one liner answers. – Mark Edington Jun 05 '17 at 13:40
-
@lukiffer i know it's a bit dumb question, but where one should run these commands ?? – Zeeshan Ajmal Sep 05 '17 at 10:35
-
@ZeeshanAjmal you can run them from whatever shell you want, so long as they're in your `PATH`. – lukiffer Oct 16 '17 at 20:10
-
seeing answers below this answer seems like a horrible idea. Why would I want to return my all settings to default just because I want to remove some queues. – Arpit Solanki Feb 26 '18 at 09:11
Actually super easy with management plugin and policies:
Goto Management Console (localhost:15672)
Goto Admin tab
Goto Policies tab(on the right side)
Add Policy
Fill Fields
- Virtual Host: Select
- Name: Expire All Policies(Delete Later)
- Pattern: .*
- Apply to: Queues
- Definition: expires with value 1 (change type from String to Number)
Save
Checkout Queues tab again
All Queues must be deleted
And don't forget to remove policy!!!!!!.

- 1,618
- 1
- 10
- 11
-
3
-
Great answer, actually made up my day. If you select "Exchanges and Queues" from the list, you could easily delete both Queues and Exchanges. I wish this could be the accepted answer. – Wiktor Zychla Dec 05 '18 at 11:20
-
Very clean solution, without the need to play around the instance SSH. – acidburn23 Mar 03 '19 at 19:15
-
-
@MesutA. Thanks a lot. I think it's good to have this link in this article. It might be even better to add it to the answer, as comments might be purged. But I have now at least this info – gelonida Oct 10 '19 at 14:28
-
@Mesut A. @Mathias Is there any particular reason this does not work for me in 3.8.3? I'm using `.*guid.*` pattern to delete only exchanges/queues that have `guid` string in them, and the policy have no effect. – Jaded Jul 09 '20 at 10:24
-
@Jaded Number vs String was for the definition field, not for pattern. An older version of this answer did not contain the information to change the type from string to number. – Mathias Jul 09 '20 at 10:50
-
@Mathias Number vs String for definition is not the case for underlying RabbitMQ version because they've added validator to value field that does not give you ability to add expires = "1", only expires = 1 (Number). To expand on the problem, what I've noticed after adding this policy, it appeared in the "features" column for target exchange ( "D", "ha-all", "NameOfMyPolicy") once (?). – Jaded Jul 09 '20 at 11:32
-
2
With rabbitmqadmin
you can remove them with this one-liner:
rabbitmqadmin -f tsv -q list queues name | while read queue; do rabbitmqadmin -q delete queue name=${queue}; done

- 2,341
- 19
- 12
-
1In my case queues are prefixed with keyword by which I can simply use `egrep`, so my command will look like this: `rabbitmqadmin -f tsv -q list queues name | egrep "%search word%" | while read queue; do rabbitmqadmin -q delete queue name=${queue}; done` – Logans Oct 11 '18 at 10:51
-
3You may have to use -H to specify host and -u and -p parameters to specify the credentials to connect to server – Sudhanshu Mishra Feb 23 '22 at 02:45
In Rabbit version 3.7.10 you can run below command with root permission:
rabbitmqctl list_queues | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs -L1 rabbitmqctl delete_queue

- 391
- 3
- 3
-
Hmm, I have ran it on Unix based OS and it works successfully, just make sure the result that passed to xargs command is ok. – Mohammad Naseri Dec 01 '20 at 19:21
-
for alpine, if you are experiencing `unrecognized option: L`, install `findutils` package - it will get you a GNU version of xargs – Ersain Jun 06 '23 at 07:08
Try this:
rabbitmqadmin list queues name | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -I qn rabbitmqadmin delete queue name=qn

- 1,768
- 2
- 14
- 21

- 892
- 1
- 13
- 24
-
2This worked for me, but also showed `*** Not found: /api/queues/%2F/name` because the output is a ASCII table with a "name" column. I tweaked the command to be ```rabbitmqadmin list queues name | awk '!/--|name/ {print $2}' | xargs -I qn rabbitmqadmin delete queue name=qn``` to fix it. – Mark Edington Jun 05 '17 at 13:52
-
1```rabbitmqadmin list queues name | awk {'print$2'} | egrep [^name] | xargs -I qname rabbitmqadmin delete queue name=qname``` – Scott Leonard Sep 05 '18 at 16:10
If you don't have rabbitmqadmin installed, try to purge queues with rabbitmqctl:
rabbitmqctl list_queues | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs -L1 rabbitmqctl purge_queue

- 1,088
- 9
- 11
-
There is no `delete_queue` nor `purge_queue` commands in `rabbitmqctl`. I would like to purge a lot of queues that seem to be automatically generated and I would not like to install extra software like `rabbitmqadmin`... – Rolice Jan 09 '18 at 09:09
-
`rabbitmqctl purge_queue` worked here manually. I only needed to add -p
– Roman Susi Feb 01 '18 at 08:38 -
Contrary to what @Rolice stated above, both `delete_queue` and `purge_queue` are available in `rabbitmqctl` and I've just run them successfully. Perhaps you're on an old version. – Richard Dunn Oct 25 '19 at 15:19
-
If you're trying to delete queues because they're unused and you don't want to reset, one option is to set the queue TTL very low via a policy, wait for the queues to be auto-deleted once the TTL is passed and then remove the policy (https://www.rabbitmq.com/ttl.html).
rabbitmqctl.bat set_policy delq ".*" '{"expires": 1}' --apply-to queues
To remove the policy
rabbitmqctl clear_policy delq
Note that this only works for unused queues
Original info here: http://rabbitmq.1065348.n5.nabble.com/Deleting-all-queues-in-rabbitmq-td30933.html

- 3,099
- 2
- 29
- 34
I made a deleteRabbitMqQs.sh, which accepts arguments to search the list of queues for, selecting only ones matching the pattern you want. If you offer no arguments, it will delete them all! It shows you the list of queues its about to delete, letting you quit before doing anything destructive.
for word in "$@"
do
args=true
newQueues=$(rabbitmqctl list_queues name | grep "$word")
queues="$queues
$newQueues"
done
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
queues=$(rabbitmqctl list_queues name | grep -v "\.\.\.")
fi
queues=$(echo "$queues" | sed '/^[[:space:]]*$/d')
if [ "x$queues" == "x" ]; then
echo "No queues to delete, giving up."
exit 0
fi
read -p "Deleting the following queues:
${queues}
[CTRL+C quit | ENTER proceed]
"
while read -r line; do
rabbitmqadmin delete queue name="$line"
done <<< "$queues"
If you want different matching against the arguments you pass in, you can alter the grep in line four. When deleting all queues, it won't delete ones with three consecutive spaces in them, because I figured that eventuality would be rarer than people who have rabbitmqctl printing its output out in different languages.
Enjoy!

- 487
- 1
- 4
- 10
Here is a way to do it with PowerShell. the URL may need to be updated
$cred = Get-Credential
iwr -ContentType 'application/json' -Method Get -Credential $cred 'http://localhost:15672/api/queues' | % {
ConvertFrom-Json $_.Content } | % { $_ } | ? { $_.messages -gt 0} | % {
iwr -method DELETE -Credential $cred -uri $("http://localhost:15672/api/queues/{0}/{1}" -f [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($_.vhost), $_.name)
}

- 4,081
- 5
- 32
- 42
-
Note, this only deletes non-empty queues. Remove the -gt clause to delete all queues – Peter Goodman Mar 17 '15 at 01:27
You can use rabbitmqctl eval as below:
rabbitmqctl eval 'IfUnused = false, IfEmpty = true, MatchRegex =
<<"^prefix-">>, [rabbit_amqqueue:delete(Q, IfUnused, IfEmpty) || Q <-
rabbit_amqqueue:list(), re:run(element(4, element(2, Q)), MatchRegex)
=/= nomatch ].'
The above will delete all empty queues in all vhosts that have a name beginning with "prefix-". You can edit the variables IfUnused, IfEmpty, and MatchRegex as per your requirement.

- 1,997
- 2
- 13
- 8
-
-
-
Has anyone tried this solution with RabbitMQ v3.8.2 or higher? I seem to be running into some undefined Erlang error. Maybe the solution needs to be updated to reflect newer versions? – ckatsara Feb 25 '21 at 15:05
-
I tried similar command as above but get a syntax error before ^ Below is my command. kubectl exec -n kayaks svc/rabbitmq-ha -- rabbitmqctl --vhost=AM-Dev eval 'IfUnused = false, IfEmpty = true, MatchRegex = <<"^WOMSProvisioningSubscrptionQueue_platform-">>, [rabbit_amqqueue:delete(Q, IfUnused, IfEmpty) || Q <- rabbit_amqqueue:list(), re:run(element(4, element(2, Q)), MatchRegex) =/= nomatch ].' – ckv Dec 02 '21 at 06:41
Removing all queues using rabbitmqctl one liner
rabbitmqctl list_queues | awk '{ print $1 }' | sed 's/Listing//' | xargs -L1 rabbitmqctl purge_queue

- 109
- 12
You need not reset rabbitmq server to delete non-durable queues. Simply stop the server and start again and it will remove all the non-durable queues available.

- 20,498
- 11
- 103
- 114

- 2,484
- 2
- 15
- 18
-
including durable queues? I don't think so. I'll qualify your answer. – Hendy Irawan Nov 26 '15 at 08:38
-
No, durable queues cannot be deleted by stopping the server. They can be deleted from RabbitMQ Management web interface under queues. – eracube Nov 26 '15 at 09:48
-
Actually yes, this helped me and all about 4500 automatically generated queues are gone. It seems that these were non-durable ones. Thanks! – Rolice Jan 09 '18 at 09:12
In case you only want to purge the queues which are not empty (a lot faster):
rabbitmqctl list_queues | awk '$2!=0 { print $1 }' | sed 's/Listing//' | xargs -L1 rabbitmqctl purge_queue
For me, it takes 2-3 seconds to purge a queue (both empty and non-empty ones), so iterating through 50 queues is such a pain while I just need to purge 10 of them (40/50 are empty).

- 6,016
- 4
- 34
- 42
I tried rabbitmqctl and reset commands but they are very slow.
This is the fastest way I found (replace your username and password):
#!/bin/bash
# Stop on error
set -eo pipefail
USER='guest'
PASSWORD='guest'
curl -sSL -u $USER:$PASSWORD http://localhost:15672/api/queues/%2f/ | jq '.[].name' | sed 's/"//g' | xargs -L 1 -I@ curl -XDELETE -sSL -u $USER:$PASSWORD http://localhost:15672/api/queues/%2f/@
# To also delete exchanges uncomment next line
# curl -sSL -u $USER:$PASSWORD http://localhost:15672/api/exchanges/%2f/ | jq '.[].name' | sed 's/"//g' | xargs -L 1 -I@ curl -XDELETE -sSL -u $USER:$PASSWORD http://localhost:15672/api/exchanges/%2f/@
Note: This only works with the default vhost /

- 1,525
- 1
- 18
- 32
I tried the above pieces of code but I did not do any streaming.
sudo rabbitmqctl list_queues | awk '{print $1}' > queues.txt; for line in $(cat queues.txt); do sudo rabbitmqctl delete_queue "$line"; done
.
I generate a file that contains all the queue names and loops through it line by line to the delete them. For the loops, while read ...
did not do it for me. It was always stopping at the first queue name.

- 654
- 13
- 13
For whose have a problem with installing rabbitmqadmin, You should firstly install python.
UNIX-like operating system users need to copy rabbitmqadmin to a directory in PATH, e.g. /usr/local/bin.
Windows users will need to ensure Python is on their PATH, and invoke rabbitmqadmin as python.exe rabbitmqadmin.
Then
- Browse to
http://{hostname}:15672/cli/rabbitmqadmin
to download. - Go to the containing folder then run cmd with administrator privilege
To list Queues
python rabbitmqadmin list queues
.
To delete Queue
python rabbitmqadmin delete queue name=Name_of_queue
To Delete all Queues
1- Declare Policy
python rabbitmqadmin declare policy name='expire_all_policies' pattern=.* definition={\"expires\":1} apply-to=queues
2- Remove the policy
python rabbitmqadmin delete policy name='expire_all_policies'

- 161
- 3
- 7
Here is a faster version (using parallel
install sudo apt-get install parallel) expanding on the excellent answer by @admenva
parallel -j 50 rabbitmqadmin -H YOUR_HOST_OR_LOCALHOST -q delete queue name={} ::: $(rabbitmqadmin -H YOUR_HOST_OR_LOCALHOST -f tsv -q list queues name)

- 11,542
- 21
- 85
- 139
This commands deletes all your queues
python rabbitmqadmin.py \
-H YOURHOST -u guest -p guest -f bash list queues | \
xargs -n1 | \
xargs -I{} \
python rabbitmqadmin.py -H YOURHOST -u guest -p guest delete queue name={}
This script is super simple because it uses -f bash
, which outputs the queues as a list.
Then we use xargs -n1
to split that up into multiple variables
Then we use xargs -I{}
that will run the command following, and replace {}
in the command.

- 1,669
- 19
- 32
-
I've tried like 10 different answers, and this is the ONLY thing that has actually worked to delete queues without killing all my other settings. Thanks! I can't believe rabbitmqctl doesn't just have a "drop all queues" command. – sudo Aug 01 '16 at 19:52
-
BTW, to get rabbitmqadmin, you need to go to `http://yourhost:15672/cli/` and download it. – sudo Aug 01 '16 at 19:54
To list queues,
./rabbitmqadmin -f tsv -q list queues
To delete a queue,
./rabbitmqadmin delete queue name=name_of_queue

- 2,019
- 6
- 26
- 31

- 687
- 6
- 10
Following command worked for me:
sudo rabbitmqctl list_queues | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -I qn sudo rabbitmqctl delete_queue qn

- 652
- 6
- 8
There's a way to remove all queues and exchanges without scripts and full reset. You can just delete and re-create a virtual host from admin interface. This will work even for vhost /
.
The only thing you'll need to restore is permissions for the newly created vhost.

- 1,231
- 2
- 11
- 21
Okay, important qualifier for this answer:
The question does ask to use either rabbitmqctl OR rabbitmqadmin to solve this, my answer needed to use both. Also, note that this was tested on MacOS 10.12.6 and the versions of the rabbitmqctl and rabbitmqadmin that are installed when installing rabbitmq with Homebrew and which is identified with brew list --versions
as rabbitmq 3.7.0
rabbitmqctl list_queues -p <VIRTUAL_HOSTNAME> name | sed 1,2d | xargs -I qname rabbitmqadmin --vhost <VIRTUAL_HOSTNAME> delete queue name=qname

- 66
- 2
Another option is to delete the vhost associated with the queues. This will delete everything associated with the vhost, so be warned, but it is easy and fast.
NOTE: the RabbitMQ team monitors the rabbitmq-users
mailing list and only sometimes answers questions on StackOverflow.

- 8,993
- 2
- 20
- 33
This is a method I use. It is easy, clear and effective. This is the document:
Vhost=the_vhost_name
User=user_name
Password=the_passworld
for i in `rabbitmqctl list_queues -p $Vhost | awk '{ print $1 }'`
do
echo "queu_name: $i"
curl -u $User:$Passworld -H "content-type:application/json" -XDELETE http://localhost:15672/api/queues/$Vhost/$i
done
Try this:
rabbitmqctl list_queues -q name > q.txt
IFS=$'\n' read -d '' -r -a queues < q.txt
count=${#queues[@]}
i=1; while (($i < $count)); do echo ${queues[$i]};rabbitmqctl delete_queue ${queues[$i]};i=$((i+1)); done
-
Your answer could be improved by adding more information on what the code does and how it helps the OP. – Tyler2P Aug 02 '22 at 10:17
As per https://stackoverflow.com/a/52002145/3278855
To automate that, it's possible to use this curl:
curl -X PUT --data '{"pattern":".*","apply-to":"all","definition":{"expires":1},"priority":0}' -u guest:guest 'http://localhost:15672/api/policies/%2f/clear' && \
curl -X DELETE -u guest:guest 'http://localhost:15672/api/policies/%2f/clear'
Please note that %2f
is default vhost name (/
) and guest:guest
is login:password

- 3,016
- 3
- 20
- 20
rabbitmqadmin list queues|awk 'NR>3{print $4}'|head -n-1|xargs -I qname rabbitmqadmin delete queue name=qname

- 2,849
- 4
- 24
- 33