Windows x64 RabbitMQ install error with Erlang environment var (ERLANG_HOME)

Question

I\'m ask/answering this question because it hung me up & it\'s likely someone else will have the same problem.

Install of RabbitMQ x64 v2.8.6 on Windows Server 2

Answer 1

I just had the same problem mentioned here. I installed otp_win64_R15B02 on a Windows 7 machine and everything worked perfectly, but I used the same installer on a Windows 2008 server and the bin directory was not created. I then uninstalled otp_win64_R15B02 and downloaded the otp_win64_R15B02_with_MSVCR100_installer_fix and the bin directory was created.

I suspect the reason it worked on my Windows 7 system is that I have Visual Studio installed and the required libraries were already available which allowed the otp_win64_R15B02 installer to work correctly.

Oh, and if you're installing Erlang to run RabbitMQ the RabbitMQ install will succeed with the broken installer but installing otp_win64_R15B02_with_MSVCR100_installer_fix after RabbitMQ will not work, just un-install and re-install RabbitMQ to resolve this.

Answer 2

I had the similar issue, modifying ERLANG_HOME in .bat files did not work. Then I tried echo %ERLANG_HOME% in command prompt, that did not print the environment variable value(I could see that ERLANG_HOME environment variable has been created under advance system settings), that lead me to believe that I need to restart server for 64 bit installation of Erlang. After rebooting server, It worked like a charm. I hope this helps someone.

Answer 3

This problem still occurs in Erlang 18.3 (erl7.3) and RabbitMQ 3.6.9 on Windows when upgrading from any older version of RabbitMQ to version 3.6.9. The solution as already stated here is to manually set ERLANG_HOME with 'setx -m ERLANG_HOME "C:\Program Files\erl7.3"' before starting the service.

What happens is that the RabbitMQ 3.6.9 installer removes the environment variable ERLANG_HOME from the system while removing the older version of RabbitMQ. Then, when it proceeds to the installation step, it does not put back the ERLANG_HOME variable. Then, the batch files that start up RabbitMQ cannot find Erlang. They try to find Erlang's home directory using "where.exe" but it always fails after an upgrade.

RabbitMQ's installer also does not kill all of the Erlang background processes, causing many of its files to be undeletable due to the Windows "file in use" problem. This leaves behind "files in use" in %APPDATA%\RabbitMQ and "C:\Program Files\RabbitMQ." These processes are "erl.exe," "erlsrv.exe," and "epmd.exe." The RabbitMQ installer should taskkill these processes after shutting down the RabbitMQ Windows service.

RabbitMQ is rather clunky on Windows.