Installing Additional Plugins

Overview

This guide describes installation of 3rd party plugins. For an overview of the plugin mechanism, plugin activation and the list of tier 1 (core) plugins, see the main Plugins guide.

Installing 3rd Party Plugins

Any plugins that do not ship with the server will need to be installed. Plugins are distributed as .ez archives (which are zip files with metadata). The files must be copied to one of the plugins directories specified by $RABBITMQ_PLUGINS_DIR.

Assuming that plugins correctly specify a dependency on the core RabbitMQ server and their files were copied to the correct directory, they will show up in rabbitmq-plugins list and can be enabled with rabbitmq-plugins enable. This is covered the Plugins guide.

The plugins directory location is determined by the RABBITMQ_PLUGINS_DIR> environment variable. Its default location depends on how RabbitMQ was installed. Some common values are:

Installation method	Plugins directory
Debian and RPM packages	/usr/lib/rabbitmq/plugins and /usr/lib/rabbitmq/lib/rabbitmq_server-version/plugins. /usr/lib/rabbitmq/plugins is an additional directory where nothing is installed by the RabbitMQ package itself. But it is a fixed non-changing path where external plugins can be installed from Debian/RPM packages or can be put there by a provisioning tool.
Windows	Typically C:\Program Files\RabbitMQ\rabbitmq_server-version\plugins (depending on RabbitMQ installation path)
Homebrew	/usr/local/Cellar/rabbitmq/version/plugins
Generic Binary build	rabbitmq_server-version/plugins (depending on RabbitMQ installation path)

Plugins and Upgrades

The enabled plugins configuration is preserved between upgrades, so there is no need to re-enable plugins after an upgrade, but because the plugins directory changes between versions, any third party plugins will need to be copied to the new directory. It's very possible that due to API changes non-tier 1 plugins will have to be upgraded to be compatible with the new version of the RabbitMQ server.

Building Plugins

It is possible to build RabbitMQ plugins from source. The sources for a particular version of the plugins is distributed in the same archive as the broker with that version. The source code repositories can all be found on GitHub.

See the plugin development guide for more information on building plugins from source.

Note that plugin releases might have dependencies to a particular version of RabbitMQ server, or at least the tip of a specific branch.

For example, if RabbitMQ version is 3.8.1 check out all plugins with the Git tag v3.8.1 or the v3.8.x branch.