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Plunger is a simple messaging client for the shell. It will closely follow the principles of *nix programs that allow chaining by piping output from one program to another. The output is readable by humans, textual, but also usable for further processing and manipulation.

It is written in Java 7, and provides convenience scripts for bash.

Available commands

• ls - lists the available destinations
• cat - consumes/reads messages
• put - sends messages to a destination
• count - shows the number of messages/consumers for a destination

Usage

Basic usage is: plunger <target> [options]

You can always use --help to see the common arguments or, when given, the command-specific arguments.

Common arguments

• -C,--command <arg> / The command to execute against the target
• -colors <arg> / Highlights the output
• -h,--help / Print program usage
• -v,--verbose / Verbose mode. Causes plunger to print debugging messages about its progress.
• -version / Prints the version

Shortcuts

There is a shortcut for each command, so instead of writing eg. plunger <target> -C ls -rv you can simply write pls <target> -rv. The name of the shortcut is p<Command>.

Target

The target is an uri that represents the message broker. You can either pass a target directly, or an alias for easier usage in the .plungerfile (see below).

The direct notation is provider://[username[:password]@]host[:port][/destination]

Configuration file

plunger makes use of a configuration file, when available. It is comparable with the ~/.ssh/config file. Targets can be predefined for easier access with aliases. You can asign multiple aliases to a target.

Location

The configuration file will be selected in the following order:

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/plunger/target
• $HOME/.config/plunger/target
• $HOME/.plunger

Syntax

Available properties are Alias and Target

Simple example:

Alias local hq
Target hornetq://username:password@localhost:5445/queue.test

So instead of writing eg. pls hornetq://username:password@localhost:5445/queue.test you can simply write pls local or pls hq. You also can override elements such as the destination, eg. pls hq/queue.other.

Note: When a destination is predefined, and you want to show all queues with pls, simply erase the destination by appending a slash like eg. pls hq/.

Provider

Plunger is messaging system agnostic, any message broker can be added. To do this, you have to implement the CommandProvider interface as SPI.

Available provider

• JBoss HornetQ (setup) >= 2.2.5 -- protocol-name: hornetq
• Apache ActiveMQ (setup) >= 5.8.0 -- protocol-name: amq
• RabbitMQ (setup) >= 3.5.x -- protocol-name: rabbitmq

Other provides are planned, take a look at the issue-list.

Building sources

See Building plunger