Server Build Instructions

Obtaining the source

• Either download a released source code distribution from the download page, or
• Check the code out directly from our mercurial repositories:

  $ hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-codegen
  $ hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-server
  $ cd rabbitmq-server
  $ make

If you choose to check the code out using mercurial, be aware that the code-generation module is a dependency of the server library. If you're working with a released source code distribution, though, the code-generation module is included.

Required Libraries and Tools

In order to build RabbitMQ, you will need a few tools.

RabbitMQ requires a recent version of Python and simplejson.py (an implementation of a JSON reader and writer in Python), for generating AMQP framing code. simplejson.py is included as a standard json library in the Python core since 2.6 release.

Additionally, you will need

• the Erlang development and runtime tools
  If you are on a Debian-based system then you need the erlang-nox and erlang-dev packages installed. If you are building and installing Erlang from source then you must ensure that openssl is installed on your system.
• a recent version of GNU make
• a recent version of xsltproc, which is part of libxslt

Building the server

Change to the rabbitmq-server directory, and type make.

Other interesting Makefile targets include

all

The default target. Builds the server.

run

Builds the server and starts an instance with an interactive Erlang shell. This will by default create a Mnesia database in /tmp/rabbit-mnesia, but this location can be overridden by setting the Makefile variable MNESIA_DIR:

make run MNESIA_DIR=/some/other/location/for/rabbit-mnesia

clean

Removes build products and wipes the Mnesia database directory used by the run target. See the above description of MNESIA_DIR.

srcdist

Runs the "clean" target, and constructs a source-code distribution tarball in ./dist.