pika 1.5.0 ships November 17, 2026: please try 1.5.0rc4

[lukebakken]

Note

Written by Claude Code under the direction of @lukebakken, a pika maintainer.

pika 1.5.0 ships on Tuesday, November 17, 2026, and from then a plain pip install pika gets it. testcontainers depends on pika, so this is advance notice and a request to try the release candidate first:

pip install --pre 'pika==1.5.0rc4'

What is most likely to affect testcontainers:

• BlockingConnection, used by the RabbitMQ module's readiness_probe, now emits a DeprecationWarning from its constructor (it is removed in pika 2.0). It still works, but a test suite run with warnings as errors fails on it; the upgrade notes give a one-line filterwarnings entry. The replacement is the new thread-safe pika.Connection.
• The readiness probe retries on IncompatibleProtocolError and AMQPConnectionError. We checked that against rc4 by restarting RabbitMQ 4.4.0 and connecting in a loop: while the broker boots, rc4 raises only IncompatibleProtocolError, as 1.4.4 does, so the probe keeps working unchanged.

The full list is in the 1.5.0 upgrade notes. Besides the deprecations, pika.compat is gone, pika.spec is now type-annotated (which can surface new type-checker errors), and an inbound message body above 64 MiB now closes the connection (configurable with max_inbound_message_body_size).

If anything breaks, please open an issue at https://github.com/pika/pika/issues before November 17, 2026, even if it turns out to be intended. A short "our tests pass on rc4" reply here, or in pika/pika#1816, helps just as much. Thank you!