Setup and Securing RabbitMQ

Changing the default username and password in RabbitMQ

First, access the command line on the server where RabbitMQ is installed in this case we used Homebrew to install our RabbitMQ server.

We can create a new user with a custom username and password using the rabbitmqctl command. Replace new_username and new_password with your desired credentials.

rabbitmqctl add_user new_username new_password

After creating the new user, you want to set permissions for this user. You can set permissions to allow the user to access all vhosts (/ is the default vhost). The command below will give the user permissions to read, write, and configure queues on the default vhost. Adjust the permissions according to your needs.

using set_permissions -h

we see that we can supply a username and its permissions under

[--node <node>] [--longnames] [--quiet] set_permissions [--vhost <vhost>] <username> <conf> <write> <read>

rabbitmqctl set_permissions -p / new_username ".*" ".*" ".*"

Optionally, If the new user needs to have administrative access, you can set the user tag to administrator.

rabbitmqctl set_user_tags new_username administrator

By default, RabbitMQ creates a guest user with the password with world's strongest password for simplicity guest, but for security reasons, we will change the default user's password or delete the user. To change the password:

rabbitmqctl change_password guest new_guest_password

If you'd rather delete the guest user you can use this command below.

rabbitmqctl delete_user guest

After making all the changes needed, you should restart the RabbitMQ service to make sure all changes are applied and avoid conflicts. You can do this using your system's service management commands.
Since we're using Homebrew we will use the brew command.
If you're on linux you can choose to sudo systemctl commands

brew services restart rabbitmq

Finally, verify that the changes have been applied correctly. You can list users to see if your new user is created:

rabbitmqctl list_users

That's it, RabbitMQ should be all setup and secured!