RabbitMQ

What is RabbitMQ?

RabbitMQ is a mature, widely-used message broker implementing AMQP, commonly used as a Laravel queue backend or for service-to-service messaging. Laradock builds it with the management plugin enabled, so you get the web dashboard out of the box.

Start RabbitMQ

docker compose up -d rabbitmq

The container depends_on php-fpm in compose.yml, so Compose starts php-fpm first automatically.

Stop RabbitMQ

docker compose stop rabbitmq

This stops the container without deleting its data. To remove the container (data on disk is untouched, it lives under DATA_PATH_HOST/rabbitmq): docker compose rm -f rabbitmq.

Configuration

All settings live in rabbitmq/defaults.env and can be overridden by adding the same line to your own .env:

Variable	Default	What it does
RABBITMQ_NODE_HOST_PORT	5672	Host-side port for the AMQP protocol (host:5672).
RABBITMQ_MANAGEMENT_HTTP_HOST_PORT	15672	Host-side port for the management web UI over HTTP.
RABBITMQ_MANAGEMENT_HTTPS_HOST_PORT	15671	Host-side port for the management web UI over HTTPS.
RABBITMQ_WEB_STOMP_HOST_PORT	15674	Host-side port for Web STOMP (STOMP-over-WebSockets).

Default login credentials are set in rabbitmq/rabbitmq.conf: default_user = guest, default_pass = guest. Edit that file and rebuild to change them.

Open the management UI

docker compose up -d rabbitmq

Open http://localhost:15672 (or your custom RABBITMQ_MANAGEMENT_HTTP_HOST_PORT) and log in with guest / guest. The rabbitmq_management plugin is enabled at build time in rabbitmq/Dockerfile, so the dashboard is available without any extra setup.

Connect from Laravel

Inside Laradock, other containers reach RabbitMQ by container name: use host rabbitmq, port 5672, with the credentials from rabbitmq.conf. Install a client such as vladimir-yuldashev/laravel-queue-rabbitmq in your app to wire it up as a queue driver.

Common issues

• Can't log in to the management UI. Credentials come from rabbitmq/rabbitmq.conf (guest/guest by default), not from .env. If you changed that file, rebuild: docker compose build rabbitmq.
• Port already in use on your host. Another local RabbitMQ (or another Laradock project) is bound to one of the default ports. Change the relevant RABBITMQ_*_HOST_PORT variable in .env and restart.
• App can't connect but the container is running. Confirm the app's config uses host rabbitmq (the container name), not localhost or 127.0.0.1, those only work from your host machine, not from inside another container.
• Two Laradock projects overwrite each other's data. Running more than one Laradock on the same machine? Set both COMPOSE_PROJECT_NAME and DATA_PATH_HOST to unique values per project, otherwise they share the same RabbitMQ data on disk.

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Need something lighter for pub/sub? See Mosquitto or NATS. New to Laradock? Start at Getting Started.