Installation from a complete bundle

The bundle zip file contains all the files listed in the next section, including an Erlang system installer and the RabbitMQ broker binary distribution, the .Net client, as well as an archive of the Java librabbitmq client library.

Installation from separate components

• Install a recent version of Erlang/OTP. Versions R13B03 and higher should work; we usually test against Erlang R13B03 on Windows, which can be downloaded from http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_win32_R13B03.exe
• Download rabbitmq-server-windows-2.0.0.zip from the download page.
• Contained in the zip file is a directory named rabbitmq_server-2.0.0. You should extract this folder to somewhere appropriate for application files, for example C:\Program Files\RabbitMQ. Once the files are successfully extracted, you should end up with a structure similar to C:\Program Files\RabbitMQ\rabbitmq_server-2.0.0. You will also need to set the environment variable ERLANG_HOME to point to your Erlang directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\erl5.7.4).
• Within the sbin directory is a file rabbitmq-server.bat which may need customisation for your installation, especially if you use a different version of Erlang. Environment variables set within the batch file are

  ERLANG_HOME

  Set this to the base directory of your Erlang installation, e.g. C:\Program Files\erl5.7.4. The RabbitMQ batch file expects the file bin\erl.exe to be present at this location. The default setting determines the base directory from the script location, which will work in most cases.

  RABBITMQ_BASE

  Defaults to the directory RabbitMQ in the user's application data directory, e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\RabbitMQ. Under Windows Vista the location would be slightly different, e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\User\AppData\Roaming\RabbitMQ This is the base directory containing sub-directories for the RabbitMQ Server's database and log files. Alternatively, set RABBITMQ_MNESIA_BASE and RABBITMQ_LOG_BASE individually.

  RABBITMQ_MNESIA_BASE

  Defaults to %RABBITMQ_BASE%\db. Set this to the directory where Mnesia database files should be placed.

  RABBITMQ_LOG_BASE

  Defaults to %RABBITMQ_BASE%\log. Log files generated by the server will be placed in this directory.

  RABBITMQ_NODENAME

  Defaults to rabbit. This can be useful if you want to run more than one node per machine - RABBITMQ_NODENAME should be unique per erlang-node-and-machine combination. See clustering on a single machine for more.

  RABBITMQ_NODE_IP_ADDRESS

  Defaults to 0.0.0.0. This can be changed if you only want to bind to one network interface. Please note that Windows 2000 (and maybe earlier versions) do not understand "0.0.0.0" and will need to have this set explicitly.

  RABBITMQ_NODE_PORT

  Defaults to 5672.

  RABBITMQ_CONFIG_FILE

  Defaults to %RABBITMQ_BASE%\rabbitmq. If this file is present it is used by the server to configure RabbitMQ application components. Note that the .config extension is automatically appended by the Erlang runtime. See the section on the configuration file for details. Note that this file is also used to auto-configure RabbitMQ clusters. See the clustering guide for details.

Running the Server as an Application

Currently, it's sufficient to change directory to rabbitmq_server-2.0.0\sbin and double-click the rabbitmq-server.bat file.

The shell window that results displays a banner message, and reports on progress in the startup sequence, concluding with the message "broker running", indicating that the RabbitMQ broker has been started successfully. To shut down the server, close the shell window. Alternatively, use the rabbitmqctl stop command.

Running the Server as a Service

The server can be run as a service instead of an application. The server will run in the security context of the system account, without the need for a user to be logged in on a console. The server should not be run as a service and application simultaneously.

• The rabbitmq-service.bat script in the sbin directory is used to manage the service. The rabbitmq-service.bat script recognises many of the same environment variables as rabbitmq-server.bat (see the previous section), as well as a few additional ones. Of particular importance are:

  RABBITMQ_BASE

  This is the base directory containing sub-directories for database and log files. The account that the service will run as must have read and write access to this location. The default location will not normally meet this requirement, so this variable must be set explicitly and the permissions must be verified.

  ERLANG_SERVICE_MANAGER_PATH

  The default value of this path is C:\Program Files\erl5.7.4\erts-5.7.4\bin. The given path must contain the erlsrv.exe Erlang service wrapper script.

  RABBITMQ_SERVICENAME

  This name will appear in the list of services reported by the operating system.

  RABBITMQ_CONSOLE_LOG

  Set this variable to new or reuse to have the console output from the server redirected to a file named RABBITMQ_SERVICENAME.debug in the default RABBITMQ_BASE directory. If RABBITMQ_CONSOLE_LOG is set to new then a new file will be created each time the service starts. If RABBITMQ_CONSOLE_LOG is set to reuse then the file will be overwritten each time the service starts. If RABBITMQ_CONSOLE_LOG is unset then console output from the server will be discarded.

• Log in as an administrator and open a command shell (cmd.exe) in the sbin directory where the broker was installed. Install the service by executing

  rabbitmq-service.bat install

• Ensure that a service with the name RABBITMQ_SERVICENAME now appears in the services control panel (services.msc). Confirm that the service account has full access to the RABBITMQ_BASE, RABBITMQ_MNESIA_BASE and RABBITMQ_LOG_BASE directories.
• If the service account is different from the account that will run the rabbitmqctl.bat script then the Erlang security cookies for those accounts must be synchronised before running rabbitmqctl.bat. The cookie is stored in a file named .erlang.cookie and stored in the home or %APPDATA% directory of the account. Local service account cookies are normally stored in C:\WINDOWS\.erlang.cookie while user account cookies are typically stored in C:\Documents and Settings\User\.erlang.cookie. The contents of the two cookie files must be identical.
• Execute

  rabbitmq-service.bat start

  to start the server. If the output from this command is "Service RABBITMQ_SERVICENAME started", then the service was started correctly. If the output reads "The process terminated unexpectedly" instead, then the service did not start correctly. Check that the environment variables are set correctly. The logfiles in RABBITMQ_BASE may also contain useful diagnostic information.
• Confirm that the service list in the operating system service list (services.msc) reports a "Started" status for the service named RABBITMQ_SERVICENAME.
• Ensure that the Erlang cookie file created by the service contains the same string as the one used by the account that will subsequently execute the rabbitmqctl.bat script.

Refer to the service guide for a complete description of rabbitmq-service.bat arguments.

Logging

Output from the server is sent to a RABBITMQ_NODENAME.log file in the RABBITMQ_LOG_BASE directory. Additional log data is written to RABBITMQ_NODENAME-sasl.log.

The log files are created afresh every time the broker starts. In order to retain a complete log history the startup scripts append the contents to the corresponding .1 files prior to starting the broker.

You can easily write your own log rotation script using the rotate_logs_all command in rabbitmq-multi.bat or the rotate_logs command in rabbitmqctl.bat if you want to perform log rotation selectively.

Installation Instructions

• Install the rabbitmq-server package from your chosen distribution - at the time of writing, RabbitMQ is included in Debian unstable (sid), Debian testing (squeeze), and Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and onwards.
• Alternatively, install rabbitmq-server_2.0.0-1_all.deb, which you can download from the download page, or by using our APT repository. The server should start with appropriate defaults. Note that the package depends on erlang-base packages, so if you use apt on a Debian distribution that has erlang-base packages available, all dependencies should be properly met.
• To adjust the settings used for starting the server, edit /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.conf, setting environment variables as described in the Generic Unix section below (but dropping the RABBITMQ_ prefix). You can additionally set NODE_COUNT in /etc/default/rabbitmq to define the number of nodes to run on a single machine.

Running the Server

The server is started as a daemon by default when the RabbitMQ Server package is installed. Start and stop the server as usual for Debian using invoke-rc.d rabbitmq-server stop/start/etc.

The server is set up to run as system user rabbitmq. This means that if you change the location of the Mnesia database or logs as described below, you must ensure the files are owned by this user.

The startup script waits for a limited amount of time, 30 seconds by default, for the broker nodes to start. When that time is exceeded a TIMEOUT is reported. The cause of this could be a misconfiguration or other error. However, it is also possible that the node simply is taking a long time to start up, perhaps because the machine it is running on is heavily loaded, or there are many persisted messages or durable queues and exchanges that need to be recovered. For that reason the timeout can be adjusted by setting MULTI_START_ARGS to "-maxwait timeout_in_seconds" in /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.conf.

Logging

Output from the server is sent to a RABBITMQ_NODENAME.log file in the RABBITMQ_LOG_BASE directory. Additional log data is written to RABBITMQ_NODENAME-sasl.log.

The log files use logrotate program to do all the necessary rotation and compression (when needed). The script runs weekly, but you can easily change that. By default logrotate will handle files located in default /var/log/rabbitmq directory. See /etc/logrotate.d/rabbitmq-server for default logrotate configuration file.

Installation Instructions

• The RabbitMQ server is included in Fedora, so for Fedora and RHEL users we recommend to install the rabbitmq-server package via the distribution's package manager.
• Alternatively, install rabbitmq-server-2.0.0-architecture.rpm (which you can download from the download page). Note that the package depends on erlang package(s). We strongly recommend using your distribution's packaged version of Erlang to run the server. See EPEL if there is no official erlang package for your distribution.
• To adjust the settings used for starting the server, edit /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.conf, setting environment variables as described in the Generic Unix section below. You can additionally set NODE_COUNT in /etc/sysconfig/rabbitmq to define the number of nodes to run on a single machine.

Running the Server

The server is not started as a daemon by default when the RabbitMQ Server package is installed. Start and stop the server as usual using /sbin/service rabbitmq-server stop/start/etc. To start the daemon by default when the system boots, run chkconfig rabbitmq-server on.

The server is set up to run as system user rabbitmq. This means that if you change the location of the Mnesia database or logs as described below, you must ensure the files are owned by this user.

The startup script waits for a limited amount of time, 30 seconds by default, for the broker nodes to start. When that time is exceeded a TIMEOUT is reported. The cause of this could be a misconfiguration or other error. However, it is also possible that the node simply is taking a long time to start up, perhaps because the machine it is running on is heavily loaded, or there are many persisted messages or durable queues and exchanges that need to be recovered. For that reason the timeout can be adjusted by setting MULTI_START_ARGS to "-maxwait timeout_in_seconds" in /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.conf.

Logging

Logging uses logrotate script in the same way as for Debian GNU

Installation Instructions

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

Running the 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.

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 $MACPORTS_PREFIX/var/lib/rabbitmq/.erlang.cookie.

Installation Instructions

• Install a recent version of Erlang.
• Download rabbitmq-server-generic-unix-2.0.0.tar.gz from the download page.
• Contained in the tarball is a directory named rabbitmq_server-2.0.0. You should extract this into somewhere appropriate for application binaries on your system.
• Within the sbin directory is a shell script rabbitmq-server which may need customisation for your installation. Environment variables available for configuration are

  RABBITMQ_MNESIA_BASE

  Defaults to /var/lib/rabbitmq/mnesia. Set this to the directory where Mnesia database files should be placed.

  RABBITMQ_LOG_BASE

  Defaults to /var/log/rabbitmq. Log files generated by the server will be placed in this directory.

  RABBITMQ_NODENAME

  Defaults to rabbit. This can be useful if you want to run more than one node per machine - RABBITMQ_NODENAME should be unique per erlang-node-and-machine combination. See clustering on a single machine for more.

  RABBITMQ_NODE_IP_ADDRESS

  Defaults to 0.0.0.0. This can be changed if you only want to bind to one network interface.

  RABBITMQ_NODE_PORT

  Defaults to 5672.

  RABBITMQ_CONFIG_FILE

  Defaults to /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq. If this file is present it is used by the server to configure RabbitMQ application components. Note that the .config extension is automatically appended by the Erlang runtime. See the section on the configuration file for details. Note that this file is also used to auto-configure RabbitMQ clusters. See the clustering guide for details.

Running the Server

Invoke the rabbitmq-server shell script. This displays a banner message, and reports on progress in the startup sequence, concluding with the message "broker running", indicating that the RabbitMQ broker has been started successfully. To shut down the server just terminate the process. Alternatively, use the rabbitmqctl stop command.

You can also start the server in "detached" mode with rabbitmq-server -detached, in which case the server process is backgrounded immediately and nothing is written to the console.

Logging

Output from the server is sent to a RABBITMQ_NODENAME.log file in the RABBITMQ_LOG_BASE directory. Additional log data is written to RABBITMQ_NODENAME-sasl.log.

In order to retain a complete log history the startup scripts, by default, append the contents to the corresponding .1 files prior to starting the broker. You can easily set up log rotation process by creating logrotate script as it is done for Debian and RPM based distributions.