I’ve been working with RabbitMQ for about ten years now. Over that time, I’ve relied heavily on its web UI. It’s useful, but I’ve always found it frustrating to work with day to day.
Back then, many of us shared little scripts to improve the experience: adding JSON formatting, quick filters, and other small tweaks that made it a bit more practical. These scripts helped, but they always felt like band-aids.
At one point, I even proposed a redesign of the web UI on the RabbitMQ Slack. The response I got was: “don’t fix what is not broken.” Looking back, that was fair. RabbitMQ itself works as it should, and its maintainers are right to keep things stable.
So instead of trying to push changes upstream, I decided to build the tool I wished existed: a desktop IDE for RabbitMQ.
What it does
The main goal is to make working with RabbitMQ more productive and less frustrating. Here are the key features I focused on first:
- Dead letter queues management: allows you to explore, search, filter, drop, and re-publish messages as needed, even in the middle of the queue
- Multi-connection support: quickly switch between local, staging, and production environments.
- JSON editor: both for publishing messages and displaying them.
- Search across everything: queues, exchanges, vhosts, all searchable from one place.
- Interactive charts: with automatic level-of-detail adjustments when zooming.
- Unified routing view: Bindings, dead letters, alternate exchanges, all in a single screen.
- Built-in docs and formatted inputs, no more raw, hard-to-read argument lists.
Why a desktop app?
I decided to make it a standalone app instead of another web UI. That way it can integrate better with the desktop environment, work offline, and handle multiple connections more cleanly.
It’s available for Mac (Windows comming soon) as a one-time purchase of $29. A SaaS subscription model didn’t make sense for this kind of tool.
You can check it out here.
What’s next
The roadmap is mostly driven by feedback from users and is publicly available on our roadmap page for those interested.
I’d also like to hear from other RabbitMQ users:
- What’s your biggest frustration with RabbitMQ today?
- What features would you like to see in tooling around it?
Your feedback would help me refine the app in next versions.
Thanks for reading, and if you’ve been hacking around the RabbitMQ web UI for years like I have, I hope this project is something you’ll find useful.
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