Celery with Amazon SQS

I want to use Amazon SQS as broker backed of Celery. There’s the SQS transport implementation for Kombu, which Celery depends on. However there is not enough documentation for using it, so I cannot find how to configure SQS on Celery. Is there somebody that had succeeded to configure SQS on Celery?

I ran into this question several times but still wasn't entirely sure how to setup Celery to work with SQS. It turns out that it is quite easy with the latest versions of Kombu and Celery. As an alternative to the BROKER_URL syntax mentioned in another answer, you can simply set the transport, options, user, and password like so:

BROKER_TRANSPORT = 'sqs'
BROKER_TRANSPORT_OPTIONS = {
    'region': 'us-east-1',
}
BROKER_USER = AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
BROKER_PASSWORD = AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

This gets around a purported issue with the URL parser that doesn't allow forward slashes in your API secret, which seems to be a fairly common occurrence with AWS. Since there didn't seem to be a wealth of information out there about the topic yet, I also wrote a short blog post on the topic here:

http://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/2011/12/19/using-django-and-celery-amazon-sqs/

I'm using Celery 3.0 and was getting deprecation warnings when launching the worker with the BROKER_USER / BROKER_PASSWORD settings.

I took a look at the SQS URL parsing in kombo.utils.url._parse_url and it is calling urllib.unquote on the username and password elements of the URL.

So, to workaround the issue of secret keys with forward slashes, I was able to successfully use the following for the BROKER_URL:

import urllib
BROKER_URL = 'sqs://%s:%s@' % (urllib.quote(AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, safe=''),
                               urllib.quote(AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, safe=''))

I'm not sure if access keys can ever have forward slashes in them but it doesn't hurt to quote it as well.

Nobody answered about this. Anyway I tried to configure Celery with Amazon SQS, and it seems I achieved a small success.

Kombu should be patched for this, so I wrote some patches and there is my pull request as well. You can configure Amazon SQS by setting BROKER_URL of sqs:// scheme in Celery on the patched Kombu. For example:

BROKER_URL = 'sqs://AWS_ACCESS:AWS_SECRET@:80//'
BROKER_TRANSPORT_OPTIONS = {
    'region': 'ap-northeast-1',
    'sdb_persistence': False
}

For anybody stumbling upon this question, I was able to get Celery working out-of-the-box with SQS (no patching required), but I did need to update to the latest versions of Celery and Kombu for this to work (1.4.5 and 1.5.1 as of now). Use the config lines above and it should work (although you'll probably want to change the default region).

Gotcha: in order to use the URL format above, you need to make sure your AWS secret doesn't contain slashes, as this confuses the URL parser. Just keep generating new secrets until you get one without a slash.

I regenerated the credentials in the IAM consonle until I got a key without a slash (/). The parsing issues are only with that character, so if your secret doesn't have one you'll be fine.

Not the most terribly elegant solution, but definitely keeps the code clean of hacks.

Update for Python 3, removing backslashes from the AWS KEY.

from urllib.parse import quote_plus
BROKER_URL = 'sqs://{}:{}@'.format(
    quote_plus(AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID), 
    quote_plus(AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY)
)

I was able to configure SQS on celery 4.3 (python 3.7) by using kombu.

from kombu.utils.url import quote

CELERY_BROKER_URL = 'sqs://{AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID}:{AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY}@'.format(
    AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=quote(AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, safe=''),
    AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=quote(AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, safe='')
)