Install RabbitMQ on CentOS7 for VCD

Author: Paul Published on: July 16, 2022 Published in: Linux

I am currently involved in a project to install a new VMware Cloud Director environment for a customer. They are not quite ready to use the newer MQTT messaging service. As part of the deployment RabbitMQ is required. Normally I would use the packaged Bitnami Appliance for this as it is all self contained and ready to go. The customer however has a lengthy engineering process to get new appliances certified. In this case we decided to install RabbitMQ service onto CentOS. The customer has existing Linux expertise so this was considered the best way forward. This article is how I Install RabbitMQ on CentOS7 for VCD.

rabbitmq_logo

I haven’t installed and clustered Rabbit on Linux for a while so I decided to do this in my lab and document it here for future use. I scoured the web for various articles, so much of this content came from various sources.

Process

Firstly set up a Linux based VM. In my case I set up a minimal install CentOS VM. See my previous post Deploy Cent OS 7 for a guide on that part. The rest of the article assumes that this pre-requisite has been fulfilled. There are many ways to install the packages but I am doing it in the following way as I need a specific version of RabbitMQ required by VMware Cloud Director 10.3.

Install Erlang

RabbitMQ has a dependency on Erlang. We first need to set the repository where we can get the Erlang packages. Due to my version of Rabbit, I will use I need an older version of Erlang than available so needed to do it like this.

Set the repository using curl:

$ curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/rabbitmq/erlang/script.rpm.sh | sudo bash

Now we can Clear the Yum Cache:

$ yum clean all

Make a new Cache:

$ yum makecache

Now we can install the required Erlang we have downloaded.

$ yum install erlang

Install Rabbit MQ

Now for the Rabbit install itself. Firstly we need to install WGET as the Cent OS machine was a base install

$ sudo yum install wget

Get the required package:

$ wget https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/releases/download/v3.8.34/rabbitmq-server-3.8.34-1.el8.noarch.rpm

Install the package

$ yum -y install rabbitmq-server*.rpm

Check the version to see that it correct

$ rpm -qi rabbitmq-server

Start and Configure Rabbit MQ

Start and enable the RabbitMQ server service

$ systemctl start rabbitmq-server
$ systemctl enable rabbitmq-server

Check the status of the service to see it is running

$ systemctl status    rabbitmq-server

In order to connect to the GUI interface of RabbitMQ you need to install the management plugins.

$ rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management

Before you can browse to the UI you will most likely need to open the firewall on Cent OS 7 for the required RabbitMQ ports

$ firewall-cmd --add-port={4369,5672,15672,25672}/tcp --permanent

$ firewall-cmd --reload

At this point you can try to browse to the service on port 15672. As you can see, you should get the login prompt. RabbitMQ comes with a default user called guest with the password guest. This is not secure so what we should do is set up our own user and give it administrator privileges.

Return to the SSH session and create a user. In the example I am setting up a user called admin with a password VMware123!

$ rabbitmqctl add_user admin VMware123!

We want to make the user we just created an administrator within RabbitMQ so we set the required tags.

$ rabbitmqctl set_user_tags admin administrator

We can now remove the guest user, either in the GUI or via the CLI.

Video

In the video I run through the above installation.