Exploring RabbitMQ and PHP

I’ll be using RabbitMQ first from PHP, but I plan on using it to send and receive messages to and from other systems. Following are the steps I used to get RabbitMQ and PHP’s AMQP library setup on my development machine.

First, I installed RabbitMQ using MacPorts:

$ sudo port install rabbitmq-server

Then, I started RabbitMQ:

$ sudo rabbitmq-server -detached

Next, I installed the librabbitmq library using a slight variation of the instructions on PHP’s AMQP Installation page (you may need to install Mercurial first):

$ hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-c/rev/3c549bb09c16 rabbitmq-c
$ cd rabbitmq-c
$ hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-codegen/rev/f8b34141e6cb codegen
$ autoreconf -i && ./configure && make && sudo make install

Then, I installed the AMQP extension using PECL:

$ sudo pecl install amqp-beta

To test that everything works, I opened up two interactive PHP shells using php -a. I ran the following code in the first PHP shell:

$exchangeName = 'messages';
$routeKey = 'routeA';
$message = 'Hello, world.';
$connection = new AMQPConnection();
$connection->connect();
$exchange = new AMQPExchange($connection);
$exchange->declare($exchangeName);

I then ran the following code in the second PHP shell:

$exchangeName = 'messages';
$routeKey = 'routeA';
$connection = new AMQPConnection();
$connection->connect();
$queue = new AMQPQueue($connection);
$queue->declare($exchangeName);
$queue->bind($exchangeName, $routeKey);

Back in the first PHP shell:

$exchange->publish($message, $routeKey);

Back in the second PHP shell:

$message = $queue->get();
print_r($message);

Here is the output I got from the print_r statement:

Array
(
    [routing_key] => routeA
    [exchange] => messages
    [delivery_tag] => 1
    [Content-type] => text/plain
    [count] => 0
    [msg] => Hello, world.
)

There are several other options that can be set, and a lot more to learn about RabbitMQ and AMP. Check out the documentation for PHP’s AMQP extension for details about working with AMQP servers from PHP.