March Hare is an idiomatic, fast and well-maintained (J)Ruby DSL on top of the RabbitMQ Java client.

It strives to combine strong parts of the Java client with over many years of experience with other client libraries, both for Ruby and other languages.

• Concurrency support on the JVM is excellent, with many tools & approaches available. Lets make use of it.
• RabbitMQ Java client is rock solid and supports every RabbitMQ feature. Very nice.
• It is screaming fast thanks to all the heavy duty being done in the pretty efficient & lightweight Java code.
• It uses synchronous APIs where it makes sense and asynchronous APIs where it makes sense. Some other Ruby RabbitMQ clients only use one or the other.
• amqp gem has certain amount of baggage it cannot drop because of backwards compatibility concerns. March Hare is a clean room design, much more open to radical new ideas.

March Hare is not

• A replacement for the RabbitMQ Java client
• A replacement for Bunny, the most popular Ruby RabbitMQ client
• A long running "work queue" service

March Hare has been around since 2011 and can be considered a mature library.

It is based on the RabbitMQ Java client, which is officially supported by the RabbitMQ team at VMware.

gem install march_hare

gem "march_hare", "~> 4.7"

MarchHare documentation guides are now a part of this repository and can be read directly on GitHub.

Several code examples are available. Our test suite also has many code examples that demonstrate various parts of the API.

March Hare supports JRuby 9.0 or later.

March Hare requires JDK 8 or later.

See ChangeLog.md.

CI is hosted by travis-ci.org

You'll need a running RabbitMQ instance with all defaults and management plugin enabled on your local machine to run the specs.

To boot one via docker you can use:

docker run -p 5672:5672 -p 15672:15672 rabbitmq:3-management

And then you can run the specs using rspec:

bundle exec rspec

MIT, see LICENSE in the repository root

(c) 2011-2013 Theo Hultberg (c) 2013-2025 Michael S. Klishin and contributors