Sending and Receiving Messages in Amazon SQS

This Python example shows you how to send, receive, and delete messages in a queue.

The Scenario

In this example, Python code is used to send and receive messages. The code uses the AWS SDK for Python to send and receive messages by using these methods of the AWS.SQS client class:

• send_message.
• receive_message.
• delete_message.

For more information about Amazon SQS messages, see Sending a Message to an Amazon SQS Queue and Receiving and Deleting a Message from an Amazon SQS Queue in the Amazon Simple Queue Service Developer Guide.

All the example code for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK for Python is available here on GitHub.

Prerequisite Tasks

To set up and run this example, you must first complete these tasks:

• Configure your AWS credentials, as described in Quickstart.
• Create an Amazon SQS queue. For an example of creating a queue, see Using Queues in Amazon SQS.

Send a Message to a Queue

The example below shows how to:

• Send a message to a queue using send_message.

Example

import boto3

# Create SQS client
sqs = boto3.client('sqs')

queue_url = 'SQS_QUEUE_URL'

# Send message to SQS queue
response = sqs.send_message(
    QueueUrl=queue_url,
    DelaySeconds=10,
    MessageAttributes={
        'Title': {
            'DataType': 'String',
            'StringValue': 'The Whistler'
        },
        'Author': {
            'DataType': 'String',
            'StringValue': 'John Grisham'
        },
        'WeeksOn': {
            'DataType': 'Number',
            'StringValue': '6'
        }
    },
    MessageBody=(
        'Information about current NY Times fiction bestseller for '
        'week of 12/11/2016.'
    )
)

print(response['MessageId'])

Receive and Delete Messages from a Queue

The example below shows how to:

• Receive a message from a queue using receive_message.
• Delete a message from a queue using delete_message.

Example

import boto3

# Create SQS client
sqs = boto3.client('sqs')

queue_url = 'SQS_QUEUE_URL'

# Receive message from SQS queue
response = sqs.receive_message(
    QueueUrl=queue_url,
    AttributeNames=[
        'SentTimestamp'
    ],
    MaxNumberOfMessages=1,
    MessageAttributeNames=[
        'All'
    ],
    VisibilityTimeout=0,
    WaitTimeSeconds=0
)

message = response['Messages'][0]
receipt_handle = message['ReceiptHandle']

# Delete received message from queue
sqs.delete_message(
    QueueUrl=queue_url,
    ReceiptHandle=receipt_handle
)
print('Received and deleted message: %s' % message)