Installing RabbitMQ on macOS

To install RabbitMQ on macOS, install it with Homebrew (brew install rabbitmq), add RabbitMQ's sbin directory to your PATH, and start the broker with brew services start rabbitmq. Enable the management plugin and you can administer the broker at http://localhost:15672. The whole process takes about five minutes.

RabbitMQ is an open-source message broker that passes messages between the parts of a system. The steps below cover a local development and testing setup on a single Mac. If you would rather not put Erlang and RabbitMQ on the machine itself, the RabbitMQ Docker setup guide gets you a broker with one command.

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Installing RabbitMQ step by step

Prerequisites

• A macOS machine.
• Homebrew installed. If you don't have Homebrew, install it from brew.sh.

Step 1: Install Homebrew (if not already installed)

1. Open Terminal.
2. Run the Homebrew installation script:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Step 2: Install RabbitMQ

1. Update Homebrew:

brew update

2. Install RabbitMQ

brew install rabbitmq

Step 3: Configure your PATH

RabbitMQ's sbin directory contains the RabbitMQ server and the CLI tools, and Homebrew does not put it on your PATH for you. The directory differs by chip, because Homebrew installs to a different prefix on each:

• Apple Silicon (M1 and later): /opt/homebrew/opt/rabbitmq/sbin
• Intel: /usr/local/opt/rabbitmq/sbin

Run brew --prefix rabbitmq if you are not sure which applies. Add the matching line to your .zshrc or .bash_profile, depending on which shell you use:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/homebrew/opt/rabbitmq/sbin

Getting the wrong prefix here is the usual reason rabbitmqctl comes back as "command not found" on an otherwise healthy install.

Apply the changes:

source ~/.zshrc
# or
source ~/.bash_profile

Step 4: Start the RabbitMQ server

1. Start RabbitMQ server:

rabbitmq-server

This command will start the RabbitMQ server in the foreground.

To run RabbitMQ in the background:

brew services start rabbitmq

Step 5: Open the management console

RabbitMQ comes with a management console, which provides a user-friendly UI for managing and monitoring your RabbitMQ server.

1. Enable the RabbitMQ management console:

rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management

2. Access the management console:

• Open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:15672/.
• The default username and password are both guest.

Step 6: Verify the installation

Check RabbitMQ status:

rabbitmqctl status

This command provides information about the RabbitMQ server status and ensures that it's running correctly.

Where to go next

The guest account only works over a loopback connection, so a broker that anything else will reach needs a real user with a password and permissions before it goes anywhere. From there, monitoring RabbitMQ covers the metrics worth watching, quorum queues explain how RabbitMQ replicates data, and the cluster setup guide turns the single node you just built into something that survives a machine going down.