Such a simple operation is not available in rabbitmqctl. You can list the queues but not clear it so wrote a python client for it. Better solution is to install BQL plugin but for now this would suffice import sys from amqplib import client_0_8 as amqp if __name__ == '__main__': if len(sys.argv) < 6: print "Usage python purge_queue.py mq_url mq_user mq_pass mq_vhost queue_name" exit() mq_url=sys.argv[1] mq_user=sys.argv[2] mq_pass=sys.argv[3] mq_vhost=sys.argv[4] mq_queue_name=sys.argv[5] conn = amqp.Connection(host=mq_url, userid=mq_user, ...