What is Marshall MQ?
I can't lie to you. I've tried. My face does a thing.
Marshall MQ is a client for Kafka and RabbitMQ on macOS, written in Swift. It is free, needs no account and sends nothing anywhere except to the brokers you add.
It is built around one rule: Marshall only claims what he can count. When a number cannot be established (the lag of a group that never committed, the distribution of 14 messages over 3 partitions) the app says can't see or too few to judge, instead of a reassuring zero.
What it does
- Reads Kafka without disturbing it. No group joined, no offset committed, no topic created by asking about it.
- Reads RabbitMQ honestly, and warns before a read that would mark messages as redelivered.
- Puts dead letters first, because a queue that filled up overnight is why you opened the app.
- Names the disagreement: the messages whose shape differs from the rest, on the exact line.
- Draws the partition chart: the hot partition, the empty one, and the key behind it.
- Gives the consumer group verdict first: caught up, behind, nobody home, never committed, mid-rebalance or can't see.
- Decodes Avro through a Confluent-compatible Schema Registry.
- Writes only when you insist: produce a message or reset offsets, each with a stated reason.
- Asks your topic: a plain-language explanation of a sample from the AI command-line tool already signed in on your Mac. No API key.
Kafka and RabbitMQ, in English and Portuguese. Nothing else is claimed until it works.
What it will not do
- Observability. No throughput charts, no alerts, no watching a dead-letter queue. That is a job for Grafana.
- Mass replay from a dead-letter queue in one click.
- Re-encode Avro when producing; it refuses with the reason.