Azure Storage Queues client library for Python
Azure Queue storage is a service for storing large numbers of messages that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS. A single queue message can be up to 64 KiB in size, and a queue can contain millions of messages, up to the total capacity limit of a storage account.
Common uses of Queue storage include:
- Creating a backlog of work to process asynchronously
- Passing messages between different parts of a distributed application
Source code
| Package (PyPI)
| Package (Conda)
| API reference documentation
| Product documentation
| Samples
Getting started
Prerequisites
Install the package
Install the Azure Storage Queues client library for Python with pip:
pip install azure-storage-queue
Create a storage account
If you wish to create a new storage account, you can use the
Azure Portal,
Azure PowerShell,
or Azure CLI:
az group create --name my-resource-group --location westus2
az storage account create -n my-storage-account-name -g my-resource-group
Create the client
The Azure Storage Queues client library for Python allows you to interact with three types of resources: the storage
account itself, queues, and messages. Interaction with these resources starts with an instance of a client.
To create a client object, you will need the storage account's queue service endpoint URL and a credential that allows
you to access the storage account:
from azure.storage.queue import QueueServiceClient
service = QueueServiceClient(account_url="https://<my-storage-account-name>.queue.core.windows.net/", credential=credential)
Looking up the account URL
You can find the storage account's queue service URL using the
Azure Portal,
Azure PowerShell,
or Azure CLI:
az storage account show -n my-storage-account-name -g my-resource-group --query "primaryEndpoints.queue"
Types of credentials
The credential
parameter may be provided in a number of different forms, depending on the type of
authorization you wish to use:
-
To use a shared access signature (SAS) token,
provide the token as a string. If your account URL includes the SAS token, omit the credential parameter.
You can generate a SAS token from the Azure Portal under "Shared access signature" or use one of the generate_sas()
functions to create a sas token for the storage account or queue:
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from azure.storage.queue import QueueServiceClient, generate_account_sas, ResourceTypes, AccountSasPermissions
sas_token = generate_account_sas(
account_name="<storage-account-name>",
account_key="<account-access-key>",
resource_types=ResourceTypes(service=True),
permission=AccountSasPermissions(read=True),
start=datetime.utcnow(),
expiry=datetime.utcnow() + timedelta(hours=1)
)
queue_service_client = QueueServiceClient(account_url="https://<my_account_name>.queue.core.windows.net", credential=sas_token)
-
To use a storage account shared key
(aka account key or access key), provide the key as a string. This can be found in the Azure Portal under the "Access Keys"
section or by running the following Azure CLI command:
az storage account keys list -g MyResourceGroup -n MyStorageAccount
Use the key as the credential parameter to authenticate the client:
from azure.storage.queue import QueueServiceClient
service = QueueServiceClient(account_url="https://<my_account_name>.queue.core.windows.net", credential="<account_access_key>")
-
To use an Azure Active Directory (AAD) token credential,
provide an instance of the desired credential type obtained from the
azure-identity library.
For example, DefaultAzureCredential
can be used to authenticate the client.
This requires some initial setup:
- Install azure-identity
- Register a new AAD application and give permissions to access Azure Storage
- Grant access to Azure Queue data with RBAC in the Azure Portal
- Set the values of the client ID, tenant ID, and client secret of the AAD application as environment variables:
AZURE_TENANT_ID, AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET
Use the returned token credential to authenticate the client:
from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.storage.queue import QueueServiceClient
token_credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
queue_service_client = QueueServiceClient(
account_url="https://<my_account_name>.queue.core.windows.net",
credential=token_credential
)
Creating the client from a connection string
Depending on your use case and authorization method, you may prefer to initialize a client instance with a storage
connection string instead of providing the account URL and credential separately. To do this, pass the storage
connection string to the client's from_connection_string
class method:
from azure.storage.queue import QueueServiceClient
connection_string = "DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=xxxx;AccountKey=xxxx;EndpointSuffix=core.windows.net"
service = QueueServiceClient.from_connection_string(conn_str=connection_string)
The connection string to your storage account can be found in the Azure Portal under the "Access Keys" section or by running the following CLI command:
az storage account show-connection-string -g MyResourceGroup -n MyStorageAccount
Key concepts
The following components make up the Azure Queue Service:
- The storage account itself
- A queue within the storage account, which contains a set of messages
- A message within a queue, in any format, of up to 64 KiB
The Azure Storage Queues client library for Python allows you to interact with each of these components through the
use of a dedicated client object.
Async Clients
This library includes a complete async API supported on Python 3.5+. To use it, you must
first install an async transport, such as aiohttp.
See
azure-core documentation
for more information.
Async clients and credentials should be closed when they're no longer needed. These
objects are async context managers and define async close
methods.
Clients
Two different clients are provided to interact with the various components of the Queue Service:
- QueueServiceClient -
this client represents interaction with the Azure storage account itself, and allows you to acquire preconfigured
client instances to access the queues within. It provides operations to retrieve and configure the account
properties as well as list, create, and delete queues within the account. To perform operations on a specific queue,
retrieve a client using the
get_queue_client
method. - QueueClient -
this client represents interaction with a specific queue (which need not exist yet). It provides operations to
create, delete, or configure a queue and includes operations to send, receive, peek, delete, and update messages
within it.
Messages
- Send - Adds a message to the queue and optionally sets a visibility timeout for the message.
- Receive - Retrieves a message from the queue and makes it invisible to other consumers.
- Peek - Retrieves a message from the front of the queue, without changing the message visibility.
- Update - Updates the visibility timeout of a message and/or the message contents.
- Delete - Deletes a specified message from the queue.
- Clear - Clears all messages from the queue.
Examples
The following sections provide several code snippets covering some of the most common Storage Queue tasks, including:
Creating a queue
Create a queue in your storage account
from azure.storage.queue import QueueClient
queue = QueueClient.from_connection_string(conn_str="<connection_string>", queue_name="myqueue")
queue.create_queue()
Use the async client to create a queue
from azure.storage.queue.aio import QueueClient
queue = QueueClient.from_connection_string(conn_str="<connection_string>", queue_name="myqueue")
await queue.create_queue()
Sending messages
Send messages to your queue
from azure.storage.queue import QueueClient
queue = QueueClient.from_connection_string(conn_str="<connection_string>", queue_name="myqueue")
queue.send_message("I'm using queues!")
queue.send_message("This is my second message")
Send messages asynchronously
import asyncio
from azure.storage.queue.aio import QueueClient
queue = QueueClient.from_connection_string(conn_str="<connection_string>", queue_name="myqueue")
await asyncio.gather(
queue.send_message("I'm using queues!"),
queue.send_message("This is my second message")
)
Receiving messages
Receive and process messages from your queue
from azure.storage.queue import QueueClient
queue = QueueClient.from_connection_string(conn_str="<connection_string>", queue_name="myqueue")
response = queue.receive_messages()
for message in response:
print(message.content)
queue.delete_message(message)
Receive and process messages in batches
from azure.storage.queue import QueueClient
queue = QueueClient.from_connection_string(conn_str="<connection_string>", queue_name="myqueue")
response = queue.receive_messages(messages_per_page=10)
for message_batch in response.by_page():
for message in message_batch:
print(message.content)
queue.delete_message(message)
Receive and process messages asynchronously
from azure.storage.queue.aio import QueueClient
queue = QueueClient.from_connection_string(conn_str="<connection_string>", queue_name="myqueue")
response = queue.receive_messages()
async for message in response:
print(message.content)
await queue.delete_message(message)
Optional Configuration
Optional keyword arguments that can be passed in at the client and per-operation level.
Retry Policy configuration
Use the following keyword arguments when instantiating a client to configure the retry policy:
- retry_total (int): Total number of retries to allow. Takes precedence over other counts.
Pass in
retry_total=0
if you do not want to retry on requests. Defaults to 10. - retry_connect (int): How many connection-related errors to retry on. Defaults to 3.
- retry_read (int): How many times to retry on read errors. Defaults to 3.
- retry_status (int): How many times to retry on bad status codes. Defaults to 3.
- retry_to_secondary (bool): Whether the request should be retried to secondary, if able.
This should only be enabled of RA-GRS accounts are used and potentially stale data can be handled.
Defaults to
False
.
Other client / per-operation configuration
Other optional configuration keyword arguments that can be specified on the client or per-operation.
Client keyword arguments:
- connection_timeout (int): The number of seconds the client will wait to establish a connection to the server.
Defaults to 20 seconds.
- read_timeout (int): The number of seconds the client will wait, between consecutive read operations, for a
response from the server. This is a socket level timeout and is not affected by overall data size. Client-side read
timeouts will be automatically retried. Defaults to 60 seconds.
- transport (Any): User-provided transport to send the HTTP request.
Per-operation keyword arguments:
- raw_response_hook (callable): The given callback uses the response returned from the service.
- raw_request_hook (callable): The given callback uses the request before being sent to service.
- client_request_id (str): Optional user specified identification of the request.
- user_agent (str): Appends the custom value to the user-agent header to be sent with the request.
- logging_enable (bool): Enables logging at the DEBUG level. Defaults to False. Can also be passed in at
the client level to enable it for all requests.
- logging_body (bool): Enables logging the request and response body. Defaults to False. Can also be passed in at
the client level to enable it for all requests.
- headers (dict): Pass in custom headers as key, value pairs. E.g.
headers={'CustomValue': value}
Troubleshooting
General
Storage Queue clients raise exceptions defined in Azure Core.
This list can be used for reference to catch thrown exceptions. To get the specific error code of the exception, use the error_code
attribute, i.e, exception.error_code
.
Logging
This library uses the standard
logging library for logging.
Basic information about HTTP sessions (URLs, headers, etc.) is logged at INFO
level.
Detailed DEBUG level logging, including request/response bodies and unredacted
headers, can be enabled on a client with the logging_enable
argument:
import sys
import logging
from azure.storage.queue import QueueServiceClient
logger = logging.getLogger('azure.storage.queue')
logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
handler = logging.StreamHandler(stream=sys.stdout)
logger.addHandler(handler)
service_client = QueueServiceClient.from_connection_string("your_connection_string", logging_enable=True)
Similarly, logging_enable
can enable detailed logging for a single operation,
even when it isn't enabled for the client:
service_client.get_service_stats(logging_enable=True)
Next steps
More sample code
Get started with our Queue samples.
Several Storage Queues Python SDK samples are available to you in the SDK's GitHub repository. These samples provide example code for additional scenarios commonly encountered while working with Storage Queues:
-
queue_samples_hello_world.py (async version) - Examples found in this article:
- Client creation
- Create a queue
- Send messages
- Receive messages
-
queue_samples_authentication.py (async version) - Examples for authenticating and creating the client:
- From a connection string
- From a shared access key
- From a shared access signature token
- From Azure Active Directory
-
queue_samples_service.py (async version) - Examples for interacting with the queue service:
- Get and set service properties
- List queues in a storage account
- Create and delete a queue from the service
- Get the QueueClient
-
queue_samples_message.py (async version) - Examples for working with queues and messages:
- Set an access policy
- Get and set queue metadata
- Send and receive messages
- Delete specified messages and clear all messages
- Peek and update messages
Additional documentation
For more extensive documentation on Azure Queue storage, see the Azure Queue storage documentation on docs.microsoft.com.
Contributing
This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.
When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.
This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.
Release History
12.12.0 (2024-09-17)
Features Added
- Stable release of features from 12.12.0b1
12.12.0b1 (2024-08-07)
Features Added
- Added support for service version 2024-11-04.
Other Changes
- Bumped minimum
azure-core
dependency to 1.30.0.
12.11.0 (2024-07-18)
Features Added
- Stable release of features from 12.11.0b1
12.11.0b1 (2024-06-11)
Features Added
- Updated OAuth implementation to use the AAD scope returned in a Bearer challenge.
- Fixed an issue where client specified service versions may be ignored.
12.10.0 (2024-05-07)
Features Added
- Stable release of features from 12.10.0b1
12.10.0b1 (2024-04-16)
This version and all future versions will require Python 3.8+. Python 3.7 is no longer supported.
Features Added
- The
services
parameter has been added to the generate_account_sas
API, which enables the ability to generate SAS
tokens to be used with multiple services. By default, the SAS token service scope will default to the current service.
Bugs Fixed
- Bumped dependency of
typing-extensions
to >=4.6.0
to avoid potential TypeError
with typing.TypeVar
on
Python 3.12. - Fixed an issue where authentication errors could raise
AttributeError
instead of ClientAuthenticationError
when
using async OAuth credentials.
12.9.0 (2023-12-05)
Other Changes
- Updated type hints across the entire package and enabled MyPy to run during CI. Some public types may have been adjusted if they were previously erroneous or incomplete.
12.8.0 (2023-11-07)
Features Added
- Stable release of features from 12.18.0b1
12.8.0b1 (2023-10-17)
Features Added
- Added
audience
as an optional keyword that can be specified on APIs that have a credential
parameter. This
keyword only has an effect when the credential provided is of type TokenCredential
.
12.7.3 (2023-10-10)
Bugs Fixed
- Fixed an issue when an invalid type was provided for
credential
during client construction, the
__str__
of the object would be present in the exception message and therefore potentially logged.
12.7.2 (2023-09-25)
Bugs Fixed
- Fixed an issue where
user_agent
was being ignored on send_message
, receive_message
, receive_messages
,
update_message
, and peek_messages
if client was configured for encryption.
12.7.1 (2023-09-13)
Bugs Fixed
- Fixed breaking
KeyError: 'sdk_moniker'
in create_configuration
.
NOTE: This is not an exported method and therefore should not be imported/called directly.
12.7.0 (2023-09-12)
Features Added
- Stable release of features from 12.7.0b1
12.7.0b1 (2023-08-08)
Other Changes
- Bumped
azure-core
minimum dependency to 1.28.0 and typing-extensions
to 4.3.0.
12.6.0 (2023-02-22)
Features Added
- Stable release of features from 12.6.0b1
12.6.0b1 (2023-02-02)
Other Changes
- Removed
msrest
dependency. - Added
typing-extensions>=4.0.1
as a dependency. - Added
isodate>=0.6.1
as a dependency. - Added extra dependency
aio
for installing optional async dependencies. Use pip install azure-storage-queue[aio]
to install.
12.5.0 (2022-10-11)
Features Added
- Stable release of features from 12.5.0b1.
Other Changes
- Changed the default value for
read_timeout
to 60 seconds for all clients.
12.5.0b1 (2022-08-23)
This version and all future versions will require Python 3.7+. Python 3.6 is no longer supported.
Features Added
- Added support for
AzureNamedKeyCredential
as a valid credential
type.
12.4.0 (2022-07-07)
Features Added
- Stable release of features from 12.4.0b1.
12.4.0b1 (2022-06-15)
Features Added
- Introduced version 2.0 of client-side encryption for Queue messages which utilizes AES-GCM-256 encryption.
Version 1.0 is now deprecated and no longer considered secure. If you are using client-side encryption, it is
highly recommended that you update to version 2.0.
The encryption version can be specified on any client constructor via the
encryption_version
keyword (i.e. encryption_version='2.0'
).
12.3.0 (2022-05-09)
Features Added
- Stable release of features from 12.3.0b1.
Bugs Fixed
- Fixed a bug, introduced in the previous beta release, that caused Authentication errors when attempting to use
an Account SAS with certain service level operations.
12.3.0b1 (2022-04-14)
Features Added
- Added support for
max_messages
in receive_messages()
to specify the maximum number of messages to receive from the queue.
Other Changes
- Updated SAS token generation to use the latest supported service version by default. Moving to the latest version
also included a change to how account SAS is generated to reflect a change made to the service in SAS generation for
service version 2020-12-06.
- Updated documentation for
receive_messages()
to explain iterator behavior and life-cycle. - Added a sample to
queue_samples_message.py
(and async-equivalent) showcasing the use of max_messages
in receive_messages()
.
12.2.0 (2022-03-08)
This version and all future versions will require Python 3.6+. Python 2.7 is no longer supported.
Bugs Fixed
- Update
azure-core
dependency to avoid inconsistent dependencies from being installed.
12.1.6 (2021-04-20)
Fixes
- Make
AccountName
, AccountKey
etc. in conn_str case insensitive - Fixed unclosed
ThreadPoolExecutor
(#8955)
12.1.5 (2021-01-13)
New features
- Added support for
AzureSasCredential
to allow SAS rotation in long living clients.
12.1.4 (2020-11-10)
New feature
- Added
receive_message
on QueueClient to support receiving one message from queue (#14844, #14762)
Notes
- Updated dependency
azure-core
from azure-core<2.0.0,>=1.6.0 to azure-core<2.0.0,>=1.9.0 to get continuation_token attr on AzureError.
12.1.3 (2020-09-10)
Fixes
- Fixed QueueClient type declaration (#11392).
12.1.2
Notes
- Updated dependency from azure-core<2.0.0,>=1.2.2 to azure-core<2.0.0,>=1.6.0
12.1.1 (2020-03-10)
Fixes
- Responses are always decoded as UTF8
Notes
- The
StorageUserAgentPolicy
is now replaced with the UserAgentPolicy
from azure-core. With this, the custom user agents are now added as a prefix instead of being appended.
12.1.0 (2019-12-04)
New features
- All the clients now have a
close()
method to close the sockets opened by the client when using without a context manager.
12.0.0 (2019-10-31)
Breaking changes
QueueClient
now accepts only account_url
with mandatory a string param queue_name
.
To use a queue_url, the method from_queue_url
must be used.set_queue_access_policy
has required parameter signed_identifiers
.NoRetry
policy has been removed. Use keyword argument retry_total=0
for no retries.NoEncodePolicy
and NoDecodePolicy
have been removed. Use message_encode_policy=None
and message_decode_policy=None
.- Removed types that were accidentally exposed from two modules. Only
QueueServiceClient
and QueueClient
should be imported from azure.storage.queue.aio - Some parameters have become keyword only, rather than positional. Some examples include:
loop
max_concurrency
validate_content
timeout
etc.
QueueMessage
has had its parameters renamed from insertion_time
, time_next_visible
, expiration_time
to inserted_on
, next_visible_on
, expires_on
, respectively.Logging
has been renamed to QueueAnalyticsLogging
.enqueue_message
is now called send_message
.- Client and model files have been made internal. Users should import from the top level modules
azure.storage.queue
and azure.storage.queue.aio
only. - The
generate_shared_access_signature
methods on both QueueServiceClient
and QueueClient
have been replaced by module level functions generate_account_sas
and generate_queue_sas
. get_service_stats
now returns a dictget_service_properties
now returns a dict with keys consistent to set_service_properties
New features
ResourceTypes
, and Services
now have method from_string
which takes parameters as a string.
Fixes and improvements
- Fixed an issue where XML is being double encoded and double decoded.
12.0.0b4 (2019-10-08)
Breaking changes
- Permission models.
AccountPermissions
, QueuePermissions
have been renamed to
AccountSasPermissions
, QueueSasPermissions
respectively.- enum-like list parameters have been removed from both of them.
__add__
and __or__
methods are removed.
max_connections
is now renamed to max_concurrency
.
New features
AccountSasPermissions
, QueueSasPermissions
now have method from_string
which takes parameters as a string.
12.0.0b3 (2019-09-10)
Dependency updates
12.0.0b2 (2019-08-06)
Breaking changes
- The behavior of listing operations has been modified:
- The previous
marker
parameter has been removed. - The iterable response object now supports a
by_page
function that will return a secondary iterator of batches of results. This function supports a continuation_token
parameter to replace the previous marker
parameter.
- The new listing behaviour is also adopted by the
receive_messages
operation:
- The receive operation returns a message iterator as before.
- The returned iterator supports a
by_page
operation to receive messages in batches.
New features
- Added async APIs to subnamespace
azure.storage.queue.aio
. - Distributed tracing framework OpenCensus is now supported.
Dependency updates
Fixes and improvements
- General refactor of duplicate and shared code.
12.0.0b1 (2019-07-02)
Version 12.0.0b1 is the first preview of our efforts to create a user-friendly and Pythonic client library for Azure Storage Queues. For more information about this, and preview releases of other Azure SDK libraries, please visit
https://aka.ms/azure-sdk-preview1-python.
Breaking changes: New API design
-
Operations are now scoped to a particular client:
QueueServiceClient
: This client handles account-level operations. This includes managing service properties and listing the queues within an account.QueueClient
: The client handles operations within a particular queue. This includes creating or deleting that queue, as well as enqueueing and dequeueing messages.
These clients can be accessed by navigating down the client hierarchy, or instantiated directly using URLs to the resource (account or queue).
For full details on the new API, please see the reference documentation.
-
New message iterator, for receiving messages from a queue in a continuous stream.
-
New underlying REST pipeline implementation, based on the new azure-core
library.
-
Client and pipeline configuration is now available via keyword arguments at both the client level, and per-operation. See reference documentation for a full list of optional configuration arguments.
-
Authentication using azure-identity
credentials
-
New error hierarchy:
- All service errors will now use the base type:
azure.core.exceptions.HttpResponseError
- The are a couple of specific exception types derived from this base type for common error scenarios:
ResourceNotFoundError
: The resource (e.g. queue, message) could not be found. Commonly a 404 status code.ResourceExistsError
: A resource conflict - commonly caused when attempting to create a resource that already exists.ResourceModifiedError
: The resource has been modified (e.g. overwritten) and therefore the current operation is in conflict. Alternatively this may be raised if a condition on the operation is not met.ClientAuthenticationError
: Authentication failed.
-
No longer have specific operations for get_metadata
- use get_properties
instead.
-
No longer have specific operations for exists
- use get_properties
instead.
-
Operations get_queue_acl
and set_queue_acl
have been renamed to get_queue_access_policy
and set_queue_access_policy
.
-
Operation put_message
has been renamed to enqueue_message
.
-
Operation get_messages
has been renamed to receive_messages
.
2.0.1
- Updated dependency on azure-storage-common.
2.0.0
- Support for 2018-11-09 REST version.
1.4.0
- azure-storage-nspkg is not installed anymore on Python 3 (PEP420-based namespace package)
1.3.0
- Support for 2018-03-28 REST version. Please see our REST API documentation and blog for information about the related added features.
1.2.0rc1
- Support for 2017-11-09 REST version. Please see our REST API documentation and blog for information about the related added features.
- Added support for OAuth authentication for HTTPS requests(Please note that this feature is available in preview).
1.1.0
- Support for 2017-07-29 REST version. Please see our REST API documentation and blogs for information about the related added features.
- Queue messages can now have an arbitrarily large or infinite time to live.
- Error message now contains the ErrorCode from the x-ms-error-code header value.
1.0.0
- The package has switched from Apache 2.0 to the MIT license.