Stomping on the Rabbit

we are trying to make a move to using message queues in my group to deal with pipelines and talking to other apps.

There should be some great advantages for us, and I am quite excited by this.

First thing, set up a STOMP message queue.

Now, I am currently writing a simple message_queue based on ClearPress, but this is not yet ready, so I have just downloaded and installed RabbitMQ.

RabbitMQ is written in Erlang, (which I have just set myself the challenge of learning from the Pragprog book Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong). The first challenge was setting it up.

First: You need erlang installed. I had already done this, so wasn't a problem. Jsut make sure that erlc is in your path.

Now, I had dowloaded the latest release tarball, and expanded this, setting up in my sandbox area. However, this threw my a serious curveball with trying to install STOMP.

Thankfully, Google is my friend, and someone had the same problem, since the STOMP needs installing against the correct version number, so I hereby give the definitive installation guide to getting RabbitMQ up and running in a sandbox on MacOSX.

(I accept no responsibility for this not working on your machine!)

1) Install Mercurial (yet another distributed version control system, but the one which RabbitMQ is on).

2) (Thanks to everyone on this page http://tinyurl.com/pk7xfd)
hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-server
hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-codegen
hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-stomp
(cd rabbitmq-server; hg up rabbitmq_v1_5_4)
(cd rabbitmq-codegen; hg up rabbitmq_v1_5_4)
(cd rabbitmq-stomp; hg up rabbitmq_v1_5_3)

3) (At this point, you need to check your version of python and simplejson, which needs installing)

4) In the various MakeFiles, alter source roots to point to where you want the various db and log files to go, where your rabbit source root is, etc..

Eg.

I set up in my sandbox a folder 'rabbitmq', in which I put a logs dir, mnesia (db files) dir and rabbit-mnesia dir (into which I put the rabbitmq.conf file)

In 'rabbitmq-server/Makefile'

RABBITMQ_NODENAME=rabbit
RABBITMQ_SERVER_START_ARGS=/my/sandbox/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.conf
RABBITMQ_MNESIA_DIR=/my/sandbox/rabbitmq/$(RABBITMQ_NODENAME)-mnesia
RABBITMQ_LOG_BASE=/my/sandbox/rabbitmq/logs


4) make -C rabbitmq-server
make -C rabbitmq-stomp run

Hey presto, you now have a rabbitmq-stomp server up and running.

Now you have done this, you can try either the perl or ruby tests.

Hope this guide is of use to someone.

Cheers

Andy