Consumer Error Handling in Symfony Messenger / RabbitMQ - symfony

Question

I'm using the new Symfony Messenger Component 4.1 and RabbitMQ 3.6.10-1 to queue and asynchronously send email and SMS notifications from my Symfony 4.1 web application. My Messenger configuration (messenger.yaml) looks like this:
framework:
messenger:
transports:
amqp: '%env(MESSENGER_TRANSPORT_DSN_NOTIFICATIONS)%'
routing:
'App\NotificationBundle\Entity\NotificationQueueEntry': amqp
When a new notification is to be sent, I queue it like this:
use Symfony\Component\Messenger\MessageBusInterface;
// ...
$notificationQueueEntry = new NotificationQueueEntry();
// [Set notification details such as recipients, subject, and message]
$this->messageBus->dispatch($notificationQueueEntry);
Then I start the consumer like this on the command line:
$ bin/console messenger:consume-messages
I have implemented a SendNotificationHandler service where the actual delivery happens. The service configuration:
App\NotificationBundle\MessageHandler\SendNotificationHandler:
arguments:
- '#App\NotificationBundle\Service\NotificationQueueService'
tags: [ messenger.message_handler ]
And the class:
class SendNotificationHandler
{
public function __invoke(NotificationQueueEntry $entry): void
{
$this->notificationQueueService->sendNotification($entry);
}
}
Until this point, everything works smoothly and the notifications get delivered.
Now my question: It may happen that an email or SMS cannot be delivered due to a (temporary) network failure. In such a case, I would like my system to retry the delivery after a specified amount of time, up to a specified maximum number of retries. What is the way to go to achieve this?
I have read about Dead Letter Exchanges, however, I could not find any documentation or example on how to integrate this with the Symfony Messenger Component.

Answer 1

What you need to do is tell RabbitMQ, that the message is rejected instead of acknowledged. By default the messenger will take care of this inside the AmqpReceiver. As you can see there, if you throw an exception that implements the RejectMessageExceptionInterface inside your handler, the message will automatically be rejected for you.
You could also "simulate" this behaviour with custom middleware. I created something like it, in a small demo application. The mechanism consists of a middleware that wraps the (serialized) original message inside a new RetryMessage and sends it via a custom message bus to a different queue, used as a dead letter exchange. The handler for that message will then unpack the RetryMessage (getting the original message and deserializing it) and transmit it over the default bus:
See:
RetryMessage
RetryMiddleware
messenger.yaml
RetryMessageHandler
This is a basic setup which rejects the message and allows you to consume it again instantly(!). You probably want to add additional information such as headers for timestamps when delaying the consumption to improve on this. For this you should look at writing your own receiver, middleware and/or handler.