RabbitMQ Installation on Windows 10

In this post, we will be performing a RabbitMQ server installation on a Windows 10 machine (Home Edition) using Docker Desktop. I have seen quite a lot of articles explaining this on Linux/Mac workstations and even on Windows 10 Professional installations but not enough using the Home edition.

I will be covering the installation process here. In the subsequent posts, I will be demonstrating a REST API service to ingest files (most likely log files from multiple services) and publish the processed data to the RabbitMQ server and consume these messages from a queue to understand the usage of RabbitMQ as a message broker service.

RabbitMQ Installation on Windows 10 using Docker

Installation

1. Download and install the recent version of Docker Desktop. We will be running the RabbitMQ server inside a docker container using docker-compose which is bundled by default with Docker Desktop.
2. Checkout this git repository which will serve as the installation directory for the RabbitMQ server.
3. Start the container by running the command “docker-compose up -d” in the above directory.
4. Try accessing the URL : http://localhost:15672 and enter the default credentials (guest/guest). The following screen should be visible indicating that RabbitMQ server is up and running.

RABBITMQ server page

Configuration

Now, we have completed the installation, so lets understand the different configurational aspects of the docker container and the RabbitMQ server:

• Docker Container

We have used docker compose in our installation, so following are the important settings that are specified in docker-compose file:

1. image : This specifies the RabbitMQ server image (along with version) used in the installation.
2. ports : This specifies the port mapping between the container and the host machine. For simplicity, this mapping can be identical as long as the port is not being used by another process on the host machine.
3. volumes : This refers to the directories mapped between the host machine and the container. In this installation, we have mapped the RabbitMQ config and log directories, therefore, the configuration files are placed in the /etc directory to override the default configurations.

Docker-Compose file

• RabbitMQ Server configurations

RabbitMQ provides a set of useful plugins to interact with the management server, allow tracing capabilities for the messages published and many more. These plugins are not enabled by default and must be enabled by specifying them in the enabled_configs file. In this installation, we have enabled three plugins ; rabbitmq_management, rabbitmq_prometheus and rabbitmq_tracing respectively.

Plugins enabled in enabled_configs file

For configuring the RabbitMQ server, the settings are be provided in the rabbitmq.conf file. These can be customized by updating the contents of configuration file present in /etc/rabbitmq/ directory. Following are the settings specified as part of this installation.

rabbitmq.conf file

These configurational files are picked up by the RabbitMQ docker container due to the volume mapping specified earlier in the docker-compose file.

This completes the installation of RabbitMQ server using docker on a Windows machine.

Thanks for reading :)