How to enable RabbitMQ management interface

Most times we're often wondering where the management interface for Rabbit MQ is or how we can access it. Even though Rabbit MQ comes with this management interface by default, it's not enabled by default most likely for security reason (just my guess).

The focus of this short article is to show how to access the management interface in few steps. All of this will be achieved using the command line. I'm assuming you already setup Rabbit MQ server, if not follow this link to do that.

The first thing we'll do is to enable the management interface, we'll do that using this command:

$ rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management

After running this command, you should get something similar to this:

The following plugins have been configured: rabbitmq_amqp1_0 rabbitmq_management rabbitmq_management_agent rabbitmq_mqtt rabbitmq_stomp rabbitmq_web_dispatch
Applying plugin configuration to rabbit@localhost...
Plugin configuration unchanged.

If you get that, we'll move to the next thing, if you don't it's most likely that something is wrong with your setup, make sure you go through the setup process carefully.

From the result displayed we can see that the command we ran enabled a series of plugins that is required for us to use the management interface.

The next thing is that we need to restart the Rabbit MQ server so that it can load the new plugings we just enabled and here is how we'll do that:

$ rabbitmq-server -detached

And we'll get an output like this:

Warning: PID file not written; -detached was passed.

After this we can access the management interface from the browser by pointing to http://<host>:15672, where hostis the host machine IP address or a domain pointed to it. If you're running Rabbit MQ locally you can use localhostin place of the host.

Opening the URL in the browser, you'll see a login page, enter guest for both username and password to access the administrative parts.

Yay! ✌️ That's it, start Rabbiting your MQs 😛.

Have anything to share? Please do well to drop it in the comments and let's learn together.