Amazon Simple Queue Service
API Reference (API Version 2012-11-05)
Next »
View the PDF for this guide.Go to the AWS Discussion Forum for this product.Did this page help you?  Yes | No |  Tell us about it...

Welcome

Welcome to the Amazon Simple Queue Service API Reference. This section describes who should read this guide, how the guide is organized, and other resources related to the Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).

Amazon SQS offers reliable and scalable hosted queues for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, you can move data between distributed components of your applications that perform different tasks without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available.

Current WSDL (2012-11-05)

Location of the current WSDL.

Making API Requests

Information about using the API.

Actions

List of the Amazon SQS actions by function.

Common Query Parameters

Parameters that all Query actions can use

Common Errors

Client and server errors the API returns

Amazon SQS product page

Information about this product

Regions and Endpoints

Regions and endpoints for Amazon SQS

We also provide SDKs that enable you to access Amazon SQS from your preferred programming language. The SDKs contain functionality that automatically takes care of tasks such as:

  • Cryptographically signing your service requests

  • Retrying requests

  • Handling error responses

For a list of available SDKs, go to Tools for Amazon Web Services

API Versions

The version of an API is specified as a date, such as 2012-11-05. The following table displays the actions associated with each API version.

Action2008-01-012009-02-012011-10-012012-11-05
CreateQueue
ListQueues
DeleteQueue
GetQueueAttributes
SetQueueAttributes
SendMessage
ReceiveMessage
DeleteMessage
AddPermission 
RemovePermission 
ChangeMessageVisibility 
GetQueueUrl  
SendMessageBatch  
DeleteMessageBatch  
ChangeMessageVisibilityBatch  

The version of the API can be found in the URLs of the WSDL file. It can also be found in the target namespace of the WSDL file.

You can retrieve the WSDL for a previous version of the API by replacing the version date in the URL with the desired version. For example, the following retrieves the WSDL for API version 2008-01-01.

http://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/doc/2008-01-01/QueueService.wsdl

Note to Users of the 2008-01-01 API Version

With the release of version 2009-02-01, we changed how you reference a queue. In the 2008-01-01 API version, you used the following structure:

http://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/<queuename>

In the 2009-02-01 and later API versions, you must insert the queue owner's AWS account number before the queue name in all service requests other than CreateQueue and ListQueues:

http://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/<acct#>/<queuename>

Specifying the API Version

For all requests, you must specify the API version you want to use with the Version parameter. Specifying the version ensures that the service does not return response elements that your application is not designed to handle.

The following example specifies the latest API version with the Version parameter.

http://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
?Action=CreateQueue
&QueueName=queue2
&AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
&Version=2012-11-05
&Expires=2013-11-15T12:00:00Z
&Signature=Dqlp3Sd6ljTUA9Uf6SGtEExwUQEXAMPLE
&SignatureVersion=2
&SignatureMethod=HmacSHA256