Using Upstart with RabbitMQ on Ubuntu 11.10

I've been tinkering with the idea of using Upstart to control celery processes for a Web site. I plan on using user jobs and hooking the rabbitmq-server and postgresql events to start and stop my celery instances. Unfortunately, on Ubuntu 11.10 RabbitMQ does not come with an Upstart job, but rather a SysV script.

Here's some instructions I've put together to convert it to using Upstart.

Install rabbitmq:

$ sudo apt-get install rabbitmq-server

It will automatically be started, so we first want to shut it down:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/rabbitmq-server stop

Now swap out the built-in /etc/init.d scripts for the Upstart job:

$ sudo rm /etc/rc0.d/K20rabbitmq-server \
/etc/rc1.d/K20rabbitmq-server \
/etc/rc2.d/S20rabbitmq-server \
/etc/rc3.d/S20rabbitmq-server \
/etc/rc4.d/S20rabbitmq-server \
/etc/rc5.d/S20rabbitmq-server \
/etc/rc6.d/K20rabbitmq-server

Put the following in /etc/init/rabbitmq-server.conf:

description "RabbitMQ Server"
author  "RabbitMQ"

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [016]
respawn

exec /usr/sbin/rabbitmq-server > /var/log/rabbitmq/startup_log \
                              2> /var/log/rabbitmq/startup_err
post-start exec /usr/sbin/rabbitmqctl wait >/dev/null 2>&1

And you're done. You can now use:

sudo start rabbitmq-server

Notable differences between this job and the SysV script:

• A lock file is not support (it was disabled by default in the SysV script anyway)
• Shutdown is achieved via SIGTERM, rather than using rabbitmqctl stop. As a side effect, the /var/log/rabbitmq/shutdown_{log, err} files are not used.