Installing on RPM-based Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, openSUSE)

Overview

rabbitmq-server is included in standard Fedora and RHEL repositories. However, the versions included are usually outdated.

There are two ways to install the most recent version of RabbitMQ:

• Installing the package using Yum repositories on Package Cloud or Bintray (this option is highly recommended)
• Downloading the package and installing it with rpm. This option will require manual installation of all package dependencies.

The following guide focuses on RabbitMQ installation on RPM-based distributions such as Fedora, RHEL and CentOS. It covers a number of topics:

• Package installation from Yum repositories on Package Cloud or Bintray
• How to install a latest supported Erlang/OTP version
• Package dependencies
• Supported distributions
• Privilege requirements
• Package downloads
• How to manage the service
• How to inspect node and service logs

Overview

The package is distributed via Yum repositories on PackageCloud and Bintray.

rabbitmq-server is included in Fedora. However, the versions included often lag behind RabbitMQ releases. It is recommended that you use Yum repositories from PackageCloud or Bintray.

Check the Fedora package details for which version of the server is available for which versions of the distribution.

Supported Distributions

Below is a list of supported RPM-based distributions as of RabbitMQ 3.6.3:

• CentOS 7.x and x.x (note: there are two separate RPM packages for each series)
• RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.x and x.x (same packages as for CentOS)
• Fedora 23 through 25 (use the CentOS 7.x package)

User Privilege Requirements

RabbitMQ RPM package will require sudo privileges to install and manage. In environments where sudo isn't available, consider using the generic binary build.

Install Erlang

Before installing RabbitMQ, you must install a supported version of Erlang/OTP. There are three commonly used sources for Erlang packages on RPM-based distributions.

• Team RabbitMQ produces a package stripped down to only provide those components needed to run RabbitMQ. It might be easiest to use if installing Erlang's dependencies is proving difficult.
• Erlang Solutions produces packages that are usually reasonably up to date and involve installation of a potentially excessive list of dependencies.
• EPEL ("Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux"); part of the Red Hat/Fedora organisation, provides many additional packages, including Erlang. These are the most official packages but tend to be out of date. The packages are split into many small pieces.
• openSUSE produces Erlang packages for each distribution (openSUSE and SLES)

sudo zypper in erlang

# add the openSUSE erlang factory, obs:// extracts the http url for the matching distro.
sudo zypper ar -f  obs://devel:languages:erlang:Factory openSUSE-Erlang-Factory

# import the signing key and refresh the repository
sudo zypper --gpg-auto-import-keys refresh

# install a recent Erlang version
sudo zypper in erlang

yum install erlang

Package Dependencies

When installing with Yum, all dependencies other than Erlang/OTP should be resolved and installed automatically as long as compatible versions are available. When that's not the case, dependency packages must be installed manually. However, when installing a local RPM file via yum dependencies must be installed manually. Below is the list of dependencies of RabbitMQ server as of 3.7.0:

• erlang >= 19.3. Erlang can installed from a number of repositories
• socat
• logrotate

Install RabbitMQ Server

# import the new PackageCloud key that will be used starting December 1st, 2018 (GMT)
rpm --import https://packagecloud.io/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/gpgkey

# import the old PackageCloud key that will be discontinued on December 1st, 2018 (GMT)
rpm --import https://packagecloud.io/gpg.key

rpm --import https://github.com/rabbitmq/signing-keys/releases/download/2.0/rabbitmq-release-signing-key.asc

[bintray-rabbitmq-server]
name=bintray-rabbitmq-rpm
baseurl=https://dl.bintray.com/rabbitmq/rpm/rabbitmq-server/v3.7.x/el/7/
gpgcheck=0
repo_gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

[bintray-rabbitmq-server]
name=bintray-rabbitmq-rpm
baseurl=https://dl.bintray.com/rabbitmq/rpm/rabbitmq-server/v3.7.x/el/6/
gpgcheck=0
repo_gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

[bintray-rabbitmq-server]
name=bintray-rabbitmq-rpm
baseurl=https://dl.bintray.com/rabbitmq/rpm/rabbitmq-server/v3.7.x/opensuse/42.1/
gpgcheck=0
repo_gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

[bintray-rabbitmq-server]
name=bintray-rabbitmq-rpm
baseurl=https://dl.bintray.com/rabbitmq/rpm/rabbitmq-server/v3.7.x/sles/11
gpgcheck=0
repo_gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

rpm --import https://github.com/rabbitmq/signing-keys/releases/download/2.0/rabbitmq-release-signing-key.asc
# this example assumes the CentOS 7 version of the package
yum install rabbitmq-server-3.7.13-1.el7.noarch.rpm

rpm --import https://www.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-release-signing-key.asc
# this example assumes the CentOS 7 version of the package
yum install rabbitmq-server-3.7.13-1.el7.noarch.rpm

Download the Server

In some cases it may easier to download the package and install it manually. The package can be downloaded from GitHub.

Run RabbitMQ Server

Start the Server

The server is not started as a daemon by default when the RabbitMQ server package is installed. To start the daemon by default when the system boots, as an administrator run

chkconfig rabbitmq-server on

As an administrator, start and stop the server as usual:

/sbin/service rabbitmq-server start

/sbin/service rabbitmq-server stop

Configuring RabbitMQ

On most systems, a node should be able to start and run with all defaults. Please refer to the Configuration guide to learn more and Production Checklist for guidelines beyond development environments.

Note: The server is set up to run as system user rabbitmq. If you change the location of the node database or the logs, you must ensure the files are owned by this user (and also update the environment variables).

Port Access

RabbitMQ nodes bind to ports (open server TCP sockets) in order to accept client and CLI tool connections. Other processes and tools such as SELinux may prevent RabbitMQ from binding to a port. When that happens, the node will fail to start. CLI tools, client libraries and RabbitMQ nodes also open connections (client TCP sockets). Firewalls can prevent nodes and CLI tools from communicating with each other. Make sure the following ports are accessible:

• 4369: epmd, a peer discovery service used by RabbitMQ nodes and CLI tools
• 5672, 5671: used by AMQP 0-9-1 and 1.0 clients without and with TLS
• 25672: used for inter-node and CLI tools communication (Erlang distribution server port) and is allocated from a dynamic range (limited to a single port by default, computed as AMQP port + 20000). Unless external connections on these ports are really necessary (e.g. the cluster uses federation or CLI tools are used on machines outside the subnet), these ports should not be publicly exposed. See networking guide for details.
• 35672-35682: used by CLI tools (Erlang distribution client ports) for communication with nodes and is allocated from a dynamic range (computed as server distribution port + 10000 through server distribution port + 10010). See networking guide for details.
• 15672: HTTP API clients, management UI and rabbitmqadmin (only if the management plugin is enabled)
• 61613, 61614: STOMP clients without and with TLS (only if the STOMP plugin is enabled)
• 1883, 8883: (MQTT clients without and with TLS, if the MQTT plugin is enabled
• 15674: STOMP-over-WebSockets clients (only if the Web STOMP plugin is enabled)
• 15675: MQTT-over-WebSockets clients (only if the Web MQTT plugin is enabled)

Default user access

The broker creates a user guest with password guest. Unconfigured clients will in general use these credentials. By default, these credentials can only be used when connecting to the broker as localhost so you will need to take action before connecting from any other machine.

See the documentation on access control for information on how to create more users, delete the guest user, or allow remote access to the guest user.

Controlling System Limits on Linux

[Service]
LimitNOFILE=64000

{
  "default-ulimits": {
    "nofile": {
      "Name": "nofile",
      "Hard": 64000,
      "Soft": 64000
    }
  }
}

ulimit -S -n 4096

rabbitmqctl status

cat /proc/$RABBITMQ_BEAM_PROCESS_PID/limits

Managing the Service

To start and stop the server, use the service tool. The service name is rabbitmq-server:

# stop the local node
sudo service rabbitmq-server stop

# start it back
sudo service rabbitmq-server start

# check on service status as observed by service manager
sudo service rabbitmq-server status

Redirecting to /bin/systemctl status rabbitmq-server.service
● rabbitmq-server.service - RabbitMQ broker
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/rabbitmq-server.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
  Drop-In: /etc/systemd/system/rabbitmq-server.service.d
           └─limits.conf
   Active: active (running) since Wed 2018-12-26 10:21:32 UTC; 25s ago
 Main PID: 957 (beam.smp)
   Status: "Initialized"
   CGroup: /system.slice/rabbitmq-server.service
           ├─ 957 /usr/lib/erlang/erts-10.2/bin/beam.smp -W w -A 64 -MBas ageffcbf -MHas ageffcbf -MBlmbcs 512 -MHlmbcs 512 -MMmcs 30 -P 1048576 -t 5000000 -stbt db -zdbbl 128000 -K true -- -root /usr/lib/erlang -progname erl -- -home /var/lib/rabbitmq -- ...
           ├─1411 /usr/lib/erlang/erts-10.2/bin/epmd -daemon
           ├─1605 erl_child_setup 400000
           ├─2860 inet_gethost 4
           └─2861 inet_gethost 4

Dec 26 10:21:30 localhost.localdomain rabbitmq-server[957]: ##  ##
Dec 26 10:21:30 localhost.localdomain rabbitmq-server[957]: ##  ##      RabbitMQ 3.7.9. Copyright (c) 2007-2019 Pivotal Software, Inc.
Dec 26 10:21:30 localhost.localdomain rabbitmq-server[957]: ##########  Licensed under the MPL.  See http://www.rabbitmq.com/
Dec 26 10:21:30 localhost.localdomain rabbitmq-server[957]: ######  ##
Dec 26 10:21:30 localhost.localdomain rabbitmq-server[957]: ##########  Logs: /var/log/rabbitmq/[email protected]
Dec 26 10:21:30 localhost.localdomain rabbitmq-server[957]: /var/log/rabbitmq/[email protected]_upgrade.log
Dec 26 10:21:30 localhost.localdomain rabbitmq-server[957]: Starting broker...
Dec 26 10:21:32 localhost.localdomain rabbitmq-server[957]: systemd unit for activation check: "rabbitmq-server.service"
Dec 26 10:21:32 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: Started RabbitMQ broker.
Dec 26 10:21:32 localhost.localdomain rabbitmq-server[957]: completed with 6 plugins.

rabbitmqctl, rabbitmq-diagnostics, and other CLI tools will be available in PATH and can be invoked by a sudo-enabled user:

# checks if the local node is running and CLI tools can successfully authenticate with it
sudo rabbitmq-diagnostics ping

# prints enabled components (applications), TCP listeners, memory usage breakdown, alarms
# and so on
sudo rabbitmq-diagnostics status

# prints effective node configuration
sudo rabbitmq-diagnostics environment

# performs a more extensive health check of the local node
sudo rabbitmq-diagnostics node_health_check

See the CLI tools guide to learn more.

Log Files and Management

Server logs can be found under the configurable directory, which usually defaults to

/var/log/rabbitmq

Assuming a systemd-based distribution, system service logs can be inspected using

journalctl --system

sudo journalctl --system | grep rabbitmq

Dec 26 11:03:04 localhost rabbitmq-server[968]: ##  ##
Dec 26 11:03:04 localhost rabbitmq-server[968]: ##  ##      RabbitMQ 3.7.9. Copyright (c) 2007-2019 Pivotal Software, Inc.
Dec 26 11:03:04 localhost rabbitmq-server[968]: ##########  Licensed under the MPL.  See http://www.rabbitmq.com/
Dec 26 11:03:04 localhost rabbitmq-server[968]: ######  ##
Dec 26 11:03:04 localhost rabbitmq-server[968]: ##########  Logs: /var/log/rabbitmq/[email protected]
Dec 26 11:03:04 localhost rabbitmq-server[968]: /var/log/rabbitmq/[email protected]_upgrade.log
Dec 26 11:03:04 localhost rabbitmq-server[968]: Starting broker...
Dec 26 11:03:05 localhost rabbitmq-server[968]: systemd unit for activation check: "rabbitmq-server.service"
Dec 26 11:03:06 localhost rabbitmq-server[968]: completed with 6 plugins.

Log Rotation

The broker always appends to the log files, so a complete log history is retained.

logrotate is the recommended way of log file rotation and compression. By default, the package will set up logrotate to run weekly on files located in default /var/log/rabbitmq directory. Rotation configuration can be found in /etc/logrotate.d/rabbitmq-server.