Bunny, a Ruby RabbitMQ Client

Bunny is a RabbitMQ client that focuses on ease of use. It is feature complete, supports all recent RabbitMQ features and does not have any heavyweight dependencies.

I Know What RabbitMQ and Bunny are, How Do I Get Started?

Right here!

What is Bunny Good For?

One can use Bunny to make Ruby applications interoperate with other applications (both built in Ruby and not). Complexity and size may vary from simple work queues to complex multi-stage data processing workflows that involve many applications built with all kinds of technologies.

Specific examples:

Events collectors, metrics & analytics applications can aggregate events produced by various applications (Web and not) in the company network.
A Web application may route messages to a Java app that works with SMS delivery gateways.
MMO games can use flexible routing RabbitMQ provides to propagate event notifications to players and locations.
Price updates from public markets or other sources can be distributed between interested parties, from trading systems to points of sale in a specific geographic region.
Content aggregators may update full-text search and geospatial search indexes by delegating actual indexing work to other applications over RabbitMQ.
Companies may provide streaming/push APIs to their customers, partners or just general public.
Continuous integration systems can distribute builds between multiple machines with various hardware and software configurations using advanced routing features of RabbitMQ.
An application that watches updates from a real-time stream (be it markets data or Twitter stream) can propagate updates to interested parties, including Web applications that display that information in the real time.

Supported Ruby Versions

Modern Bunny versions support

CRuby 2.0 through 2.4

Bunny works sufficiently well on JRuby but there are known JRuby bugs in versions prior to JRuby 9000 that cause high CPU burn. JRuby users should use March Hare.

Bunny 1.7.x was the last version to support CRuby 1.9.3 and 1.8.7

Supported RabbitMQ Versions

Bunny 1.5.0 and later versions only support RabbitMQ 3.3+. Bunny 1.4.x and earlier supports RabbitMQ 2.x and 3.x.

Project Maturity

Bunny is a mature library (started in early 2009) with a stable public API.

Installation & Bundler Dependency

Most Recent Release

With Rubygems

To install Bunny with RubyGems:

gem install bunny

Bundler Dependency

To use Bunny in a project managed with Bundler:

gem "bunny", ">= 2.6.3"

Quick Start

Below is a small snippet that demonstrates how to publish and synchronously consume ("pull API") messages with Bunny.

For a 15 minute tutorial using more practical examples, see Getting Started with RabbitMQ and Ruby using Bunny.

require "bunny"

# Start a communication session with RabbitMQ
conn = Bunny.new
conn.start

# open a channel
ch = conn.create_channel

# declare a queue
q  = ch.queue("test1")

# publish a message to the default exchange which then gets routed to this queue
q.publish("Hello, everybody!")

# fetch a message from the queue
delivery_info, metadata, payload = q.pop

puts "This is the message: #{payload}"

# close the connection
conn.stop

Documentation

Getting Started

For a 15 minute tutorial using more practical examples, see Getting Started with RabbitMQ and Ruby using Bunny.

Guides

Other documentation guides are available at rubybunny.info:

API Reference

Bunny API Reference.

Community and Getting Help

Mailing List

Bunny has a mailing list. We encourage you to also join the RabbitMQ mailing list mailing list. Feel free to ask any questions that you may have.

Continuous Integration

News & Announcements on Twitter

To subscribe for announcements of releases, important changes and so on, please follow @rubyamqp on Twitter.

More detailed announcements can be found in the blogs

RabbitMQ Ruby clients blog

Reporting Issues

If you find a bug, poor default, missing feature or find any part of the API inconvenient, please file an issue on GitHub. When filing an issue, please specify which Bunny and RabbitMQ versions you are using, provide recent RabbitMQ log file contents if possible, and try to explain what behavior you expected and why. Bonus points for contributing failing test cases.

Other Ruby RabbitMQ Clients

The other widely used Ruby RabbitMQ client is March Hare (JRuby-only). It's a mature library that require RabbitMQ 3.3.x or later.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information about running various test suites.

License

Released under the MIT license.