Running Rabbit MQ on Mac OSX – Solving {badrpc,nodedown}

Im currently exploring Rabbit MQ and had a few issues getting up and running reliably on Mac OSX. The problem wasted so much of my own free time that I thought it would be a good idea to post about it and perhaps it might help others in the future.

The Problem

The broken boots normally as the rabbitmq user defined in the system - however, when trying to connect to it using rabbitmqctl you get the following error (repeatedly):

macbookpro:~ timperrett$ sudo rabbitmqctl status
Status of node rabbit@macbookpro ...
{badrpc,nodedown}
...done.

The Solution

After many hours dabbling, and checking, checking again, rechecking my user and permissions setup, I found that it was actually to do with the way in which ERlang networks. Essentially, I was running the broker on:

rabbit@macbookpro

However, whilst I could ping the host “macbookpro” from terminal, it appears that Rabbit MQ needed it defined in the /etc/hosts file in order to work correctly.

Both strange and annoying, perhaps this will save someone some time!