Idjit's Guide To Installing RabbitMQ On openSUSE 12.2

The RabbitMQ team provides a generic SUSE RPM which works on openSUSE 11.x, openSUSE 12.1, and I presume on the pay-to-play versions of SuSE Enterprise Server. About the only real dependency for RabbitMQ is the erlang platform which is packaged in the erlang language repo. So the only real trick is getting the RabbitMQ package itself [from this page].  Then install and start is as simple as:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/erlang/openSUSE_12.2 erlang
zypper in erlang
wget http://www.rabbitmq.com/releases/rabbitmq-server/v2.8.6/rabbitmq-server-2.8.6-1.suse.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh rabbitmq-server-2.8.6-1.suse.noarch.rpm

Now before you start the rabbitmq-server you need to modify the /etc/init.d/rabbitmq-server file changing "LOCK_FILE=/var/lock/subsys/$NAME" to "LOCK_FILE=/var/run/rabbitmq/$NAME".  The directory "/var/lock/subsys/$NAME" doesn't exist on openSUSE, so this change puts the lock file over under /var/run/rabbitmq along with the PID file.  Otherwise you can create the /var/lock/subsys/$NAME directory with the appropriate permissions.

Every time you modify a service script in /etc/init.d you need to then run systemctl --system daemon-reload so that systemd knows to anticipate the changed file.

If you want to use Rabbit's management interface you now need to enable the appropriate plugins:

rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management
rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management_visualiser

By default RabbitMQ will listen on all your hosts interfaces for erlang kernel, AMQP, and HTTP (management interface) connections.  Especially in the case of a developement host you may want to restrict the availability of one or all of these services to the local machine.

In order to keep the erlang kernel and Rabbit's AMQ listeners restricted to the local host you'll need to add two exported environment variables to the service script - just put them in following the definition of PID_FILE.

export RABBITMQ_NODENAME=rabbit@localhost
export ERL_EPMD_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1

For the management inteface and other components you'll need to modify [and possibly create] the /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.config configuration file.  RabbitMQ violates the only-have-one-way-to-configure rule of system administration; this is in part due to its reliance on the Erlang runtime - controlling the behavior of the run-time is a [poorly documented] black art.  Both the environment variables and the configuration file are required to restrict all the components to the local interface.  The following configuration file restricts HTTP [management interface] and AMQP services to the localhost and informs the RabbitMQ application that it should find the Erlang kernel at the address 127.0.0.1.

[
  {mnesia, [{dump_log_write_threshold, 1000}]},
  {kernel,[{inet_dist_use_interface,{127,0,0,1}}]},
  {rabbit, [{tcp_listeners, [{"127.0.0.1", 5672}]}]},
  {rabbitmq_management,  [ {http_log_dir,   "/tmp/rabbit-mgmt"} ] },
  {rabbitmq_management_agent, [ {force_fine_statistics, true} ] },
  {rabbitmq_mochiweb, [ {listeners, [{mgmt, [{port, 55672},
                                             {ip, "127.0.0.1"}]}]},
                        {default_listener, [{port, 60000} ] } ] }
 ].

Always modify the configuration file when the RabbitMQ service is shutdown.  A botched configuration file can render the broker unable to shutdown properly leaving you to have to manually kill the processes old-school.

With the RABBITMQ_NODENAME defined in the services file you will either need to add that same variable to the administrator's and application's environment or specify the node name when attempting to connect to or manage the RabbitMQ broker service [your application probably already refers to a configured broker, but you'll certainly have to deal with this when using the rabbitmqclt command].

Now the service should start:

service rabbitmq-server start

The broker service should now be running and you can see the components' open TCP connections using the netstat command.  The management interface should also be available on TCP/55672 [via your browser of choice] unless you specified an alternative port in the rabbitmq.config file.

linux-nysu:/etc/init.d # netstat --listen --tcp --numeric --program
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Local Address    Foreign Address State  PID/Program name  
tcp   127.0.0.1:5672   0.0.0.0:*       LISTEN 23180/beam.smp     
tcp   127.0.0.1:60712  0.0.0.0:*       LISTEN 23180/beam.smp     
tcp   127.0.0.1:4369   0.0.0.0:*       LISTEN 22681/epmd         
tcp   127.0.0.1:55672  0.0.0.0:*       LISTEN 23180/beam.smp     

Now you probably want to do some configuration and provisioning using the rabbitmqctl command; but your RabbitMQ instance is up and running.