8. Administering RabbitMQ from the Web

This chapter covers Advantages of the Management plugin over the rabbitmqctl script Enabling RabbitMQ Management plugin Management plugin features Management users, queue, and exchanges from the web console Introduction to the Management plugin REST interface

So far our way of administering RabbitMQ has been based on the command line via the rabbitmqctl script. After typing rabbitmqctl so many times, you may have dreamed about a way to administer the server from a graphical interface, since there’s phpMyAdmin for MySQL or Futon for CouchDB. The need for such a graphical interface led the RabbitMQ community to produce several web admins for RabbitMQ with more or less the same features: displaying queue stats, adding users, creating vhosts, and so on. Thankfully the RabbitMQ team listened to the call from the community and developed the RabbitMQ Management plugin. Along the way, they improved the server’s Erlang API in order to collect more stats about the broker usage, such as messages sent per second, queue usage rates, and more. In this chapter you’ll learn about using this plugin, from enabling it to using its web interface to manage users, queues, and exchanges. Further on you’ll learn about the new REST API, which can be easily accessed via the new rabbitmqadmin script.