Installing with Macports

Users of Mac OS X who do not use MacPorts or Homebrew can use the Generic Unix installation instructions instead.

A portfile for the RabbitMQ server is included in MacPorts. From the MacPorts home page:

The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.

RabbitMQ maintains a dedicated MacPorts repository, which you should use to install the latest RabbitMQ server version via MacPorts, as officially released MacPorts packaging may not always contain the lastest released version of RabbitMQ.
(NB It can take a very long time to install other macport updates - see man port for options).

Install the Server

Installation of the version of the RabbitMQ server distributed with MacPorts is as simple as (sudo port sync followed by)

sudo port install rabbitmq-server

Run RabbitMQ Server

To start the server, you can either use launchctl (see the instructions emitted during the sudo port install step) or you can start it from the command line with sudo rabbitmq-server -detached.

The rabbitmq-server, rabbitmqctl, and other RabbitMQ-related scripts on the path automatically (through sudo) run in the context of the rabbitmq user, so that the Erlang cookie can be read from (sudo) $MACPORTS_PREFIX/var/lib/rabbitmq/.erlang.cookie.

See the Generic Unix or Linux installation section for further information.