QuillMQ

A lightweight, single-node message broker written from scratch in Python asyncio. It provides work queues, pub/sub fan-out, RPC request/reply, and at-least-once durable delivery over a small custom TCP protocol. No RabbitMQ or AMQP dependency.

QuillMQ is to RabbitMQ what SQLite is to PostgreSQL: not a replacement for a clustered production broker, but the better fit when you want embeddable, single-node, zero-ops messaging you can read and own. See COMPARISON.md for an honest side-by-side.

Install

uv sync --extra dev

Run the broker

uv run quillmq serve --port 5555 --data ./quill.db

Omit --data for an in-memory broker.

Python client

from quillmq import connect

conn = await connect("quill://127.0.0.1:5555")
ch = await conn.channel()
await ch.declare_queue("tasks", durable=True)
await ch.publish("", "tasks", {"job": 1})
async for msg in ch.consume("tasks", prefetch=10):
    handle(msg.body)
    await msg.ack()

Patterns

• Work queue: many consumers on one queue compete; each message is delivered once.
• Pub/sub: bind several queues to a fanout or topic exchange.
• RPC: await ch.rpc_call("service.rpc", {...}), served by quillmq.rpc.RPCServer.

CLI

quillmq serve --port 5555 --data ./quill.db
quillmq publish "" tasks '{"job": 1}'
quillmq stats
quillmq tail tasks

Running in production (single node)

QuillMQ is single-node by design (no clustering), but a single instance is built to run as a real service:

quillmq serve \
  --port 5555 \
  --data ./quill.db \
  --auth-token "$QUILLMQ_AUTH_TOKEN" \
  --tls-cert cert.pem --tls-key key.pem \
  --heartbeat 60 \
  --max-delivery-count 10 --dead-letter-queue dead \
  --metrics-port 9095 \
  --json-logs

• Structured logging (text or JSON), and graceful shutdown on SIGTERM/SIGINT.
• Idle connections are reaped after --heartbeat seconds; clients send keepalives automatically.
• Poison messages are dead-lettered after --max-delivery-count attempts; set a per-message TTL with a ttl header (seconds).
• TLS: pass --tls-cert/--tls-key and connect with a quills:// URL.
• Prometheus metrics are served at http://host:9095/metrics.
• Every flag has a QUILLMQ_* environment variable equivalent.

Docker

docker compose up --build

This starts a durable broker on port 5555 with a named volume for persistence. To build the image directly:

docker build -t quillmq:latest .

Behind a TLS-intercepting corporate proxy, pass your CA or, as a last resort:

docker build -t quillmq:latest \
  --build-arg UV_SYNC_FLAGS="--allow-insecure-host pypi.org --allow-insecure-host files.pythonhosted.org" .

Licence

Apache-2.0.