Deploying ActiveMQ on Ubuntu 8.10

These instructions target Ubuntu 8.10, but they should work on 8.04 and 7.10 as well. I haven't tested those myself, so if you try them on a different version, I'd love to hear how it goes.

Prerequisites

ActiveMQ is a Java application, so you'll need a JRE installed.

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre

Installing ActiveMQ

1. Grab the latest stable release. I used 5.2.0.

   wget http://www.apache.org/dist/activemq/apache-activemq/5.2.0/apache-activemq-5.2.0-bin.tar.gz

2. Unpack it somewhere sensible. I use /usr/local, though I suspect there are better choices — leave a comment if you know of one.

   sudo tar -xzvf apache-activemq-5.2.0-bin.tar.gz -C /usr/local/

3. Configure the broker name in /usr/local/apache-activemq-5.2.0/conf/activemq.xml by replacing all instances of "localhost" with the actual machine name.
4. Start ActiveMQ by running /usr/local/apache-activemq-5.2.0/bin/activemq.
5. Fire up a browser and navigate to http://brokername:8161/admin. You should see the ActiveMQ admin console.

Keeping ActiveMQ running

Running ActiveMQ as root (or indeed any service you don't absolutely have to) is a Bad Idea. Create a dedicated activemq user and hand over ownership of the data directory.

sudo adduser --system activemq
sudo chown -R activemq /usr/local/apache-activemq-5.2.0/data

I use DaemonTools to keep ActiveMQ alive. If you haven't already, install DaemonTools first.

Create a service directory for ActiveMQ and populate it with the required scripts.

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/apache-activemq-5.2.0/service/activemq/{,log,log/main}

/usr/local/apache-activemq-5.2.0/service/activemq/run should look like this:

#!/bin/sh
exec 2>&1

USER=activemq

exec softlimit -m 1073741824 \
     setuidgid $USER \
/usr/local/apache-activemq-5.2.0/bin/activemq

/usr/local/apache-activemq-5.2.0/service/activemq/log/run should look like this:

#!/bin/sh
USER=activemq
exec setuidgid $USER multilog t s1000000 n10 ./main

Make both run scripts executable, set the log/main directory ownership, and symlink the service directory into /etc/service/.

sudo sh -c "find /usr/local/apache-activemq-5.2.0/service/activemq -name 'run' |xargs chmod +x,go-wr"
sudo chown activemq /usr/local/apache-activemq-5.2.0/service/activemq/log/main
sudo ln -s /usr/local/apache-activemq-5.2.0/service/activemq /etc/service/activemq

Now fire it up.

sudo svc -u /etc/service/activemq

Tail the logs to make sure everything looks healthy.

sudo tail -F /etc/service/activemq/log/main/current

Troubleshooting

When I first did this I got a bunch of stack traces with the following message:

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'org.apache.activemq.xbean.XBeanBrokerService#0' defined in class path resource [activemq.xml]: Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is java.lang.RuntimeException: java.io.FileNotFoundException: /usr/local/apache-activemq-5.2.0/data/kr-store/state/hash-index-store-state_state (Permission denied)

This happened because I stopped ActiveMQ after changing ownership of the data directory, causing it to dump a state file owned by the wrong user. If you hit the same problem, just re-run the chown on the data directory.

Thanks

Thanks to Sean O'Halpin, who introduced me to message queues and ActiveMQ, and to Dave Evans, who introduced me to DaemonTools.