Amazon EC2

Choose instance type

First, you need to choose what instance type to run. RabbitMQ will work on every instance type, but there are a few considerations worth bearing in mind:

• RabbitMQ will work on 32-bit operating system, but for production usage we recommend 64-bit instances.
• RabbitMQ by default will take advantage of all the processors in the system. However a single strong CPU configuration might behave slightly better than a collection of weak processors.
• In some cases RabbitMQ requires substantial amounts of memory. Make sure that your host does have enough RAM and always have at least a few gigabytes of swap space enabled.

Choose operating system

Although RabbitMQ is tested with most major Linux distributions, Ubuntu support for Amazon EC2 seems to be strongest. You can get the list of Ubuntu AMI images here:

      http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/

You may find more information in Ubuntu EC2 Starters Guide.

Install RabbitMQ

Ubuntu ships with RabbitMQ but it's often not the latest version. If you want the recent version, you may use our Debian repository. Here is a shell script rabbitmq-user-data.sh that automates RabbitMQ installation on Ubuntu:

#!/bin/sh
cat <<EOF > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rabbitmq.list
deb http://www.rabbitmq.com/debian/ testing main
EOF

curl http://www.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-signing-key-public.asc -o /tmp/rabbitmq-signing-key-public.asc
apt-key add /tmp/rabbitmq-signing-key-public.asc
rm /tmp/rabbitmq-signing-key-public.asc

apt-get -qy update
apt-get -qy install rabbitmq-server

Instead of running it manually, you can tell the instance to run this script automatically during the first start. You can do it using the user-data-file command line option for the ec2-run-instances command. For example:

$ ec2-run-instances ami-XXX \
    --key ${EC2_KEYPAIR} \
    --instance-type m1.large \
    --region eu-west-1 \
    --user-data-file rabbitmq-user-data.sh

Put your chosen AMI id in the place of ami-XXX. The string ${EC2_KEYPAIR} should be replaced with the public ssh keypair name that is going to be used to log in to the instance. You can find more information about ec2-run-instances command in EC2 Getting Started Guide.

Persistent data on EBS device

RabbitMQ writes data to the following directories on Ubuntu:

• /var/lib/rabbitmq/ to store persistent data like the messages or queues
• /var/log/rabbitmq/ to store logs

If you want to use EBS block device to store RabbitMQ data, just link these directories to your EBS device. Stop RabbitMQ before making any changes to the data directory:

$ /etc/init.d/rabbitmq-server stop

Issues with hostname

RabbitMQ names the database directory using the current hostname of the system. If the hostname changes, a new empty database is created. To avoid data loss it's crucial to set up a fixed and resolvable hostname. For example:

sudo -s # become root
echo "rabbit" > /etc/hostname
echo "127.0.0.1 rabbit" >> /etc/hosts
hostname -F /etc/hostname

Whenever the hostname changes you should restart RabbitMQ:

$ /etc/init.d/rabbitmq-server restart