Use hawt.io for ActiveMQ web monitoring permalink

The documentation at Apache for ActiveMQ’s integration in their Karaf OSGi container is a little out-of-date. Installing the activemq bundles from the repo doesn’t make available the troubleshoot-friendly web console typically available with at OOTB, basic AMQ install.

At the time of this writing, the documentation states that it was last tested with Karaf 2.3.0 and the current version of Karaf is 3.0.1. To be clear, these instructions are for Karaf 3.0.1 and ActiveMQ 5.9.1 and are not guaranteed to work with other versions. But I hope they help others in their endeavors.

WARNING: If at any time the activemq-broker feature is installed, it is impossible to uninstall it from the konsole. The installation and activation of ANY of the bundles from the activemq repo will start a broker within the Karaf container on port 61616.

So let’s begin:

Add the activemq repo:

$ feature:repo-add activemq 5.9.1
$ feature:list | grep -i activemq

We can now see that the following features are available for installation:

• activemq-client - Just the client libraries
• activemq-broker - A full-fledged message broker and is supposed to include a web console to help monitor the running broker - all wired together (depends on activemq and activemq-web-console)
• activemq-broker-noweb - A full-fledged message broker without any fancy web console
• activemq-web-console - A web application that can connect to and provide information about a running message broker
• activemq - Some of the broker libraries, but doesn’t actually contain a broker (I think)
• some others I didn’t really care about

You now have to decide:

Do I want to Karaf to manage my message broker?

If you answered “no,” do yourself a favor and only install what you need, which is just the activemq-client feature:

$ feature:install activemq-client

If you answered “yes,” install just the activemq-broker-noweb feature:

$ feature:install activemq-broker-noweb

The activemq-web-console (and by proxy, the activemq-broker) feature is broken. It doesn’t work. At all. So it’s pointless to install it.

If you want some sort of web admin for your broker, hawt.io is super easy to get installed and running in Karaf. Though, I do it a bit differently than they suggest, the net effect is the same:

$ feature:repo-add hawtio 1.4.0
$ feature:install hawtio