How to Make RabbitMQ Consumer Process Only One Queue Message

RabbitMQ Consumer Can Pull Up to 250 Messages from Queue

In RabbitMQ, the prefetch size control how many messages a consumer would pull from the queue.

By default if you do not specify, it would be 250 messages according to the this article in Rabbitmq.

However, I faced the scenario where I would prefer to process one message only every single time. And the question is how?

How to Setup Consumer Consume Only 1 Message from the Queue?

The simple answer is to set your prefetch size to 1 in your consumer channel.

Below is the sample code write with npm package amqp-connection-manager.

import amqp from "amqp-connection-manager"; async function initConsumer() { const connection = amqp.connect("amqp://localhost"); const channelWrapper = connection.createChannel({ json: false, setup: (channel: amqplib.ConfirmChannel) => { const queue = "my-queue"; return Promise.all([ channel.assertQueue(queue), // The MOST IMPORTANT part to configure how many messages the channel fetch from queue. channel.prefetch(1), channel.consume(queue, (message) => { if (message) { console.log(`Received message: ${message.content.toString()}`); // Process the message here channelWrapper.ack(message); // Acknowledge the message } }), ]); }, }); await channelWrapper.waitForConnect(); }

TLDR, channel.prefetch(1) is the answer here.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next one.