Problem Statement:

I have installed RabbitMQ on windows machine N number of times, but this time, it swallowed all my brain. Reason? Maybe the new permissions/policies that my company has enforced. I have installed Erlang 10, set ERLANG_HOME as well, and then installed RabbitMQ 3.7.7. No error, no exception, but I was unable to see RabbitMQ as a service.

Possible Solutions to try:

1. Install Erlang and RabbitMQ as Administrator: For this, right-click on the exe and select Run As Administrator. The chances are your installations work fine and you could see RabbitMQ running as a service.
2. Create ERLANG_HOME: There may be a possibility that you are using multiple versions of Erlang. In such a case, though you can do this otherwise as well, create an environment variable named, ERLANG_HOME and provide the value where your erlang is installed on the disk. Say for example, in my case it was installed at the default location, which is, C:\Program Files\erl10.0.1. So I gave that in this environment variable.

What Worked for Me:

I have tried all the aforementioned possible solutions, but nothing worked though. To manually run RabbitMQ server, do the following.

1. Open Notepad++ / or any other text editor.
2. Write down the following commands in it.
   
   
3. PowerShell

    

   
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

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   cd C:\Program Files\RabbitMQ Server\rabbitmq_server-3.7.7\sbin

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   rabbitmq-server.bat start

   
   

   
   
4. I have installed RabbitMQ version 3.7.7 If you have used some other version, or some other location where you have installed RabbitMQ, modify the above content accordingly.
5. Save the file on your Desktop with a .bat extension.

You are good to go. Now click on the newly created bat file on your Desktop, it will start RabbitMQ server. 

Installing/Activating/Enabling RabbitMQ Management plugin.

To activate RabbitMQ management plugin, follow below mentioned steps.

1. Open File Explorer.
2. Go to RabbitMQ sbin directory. If the default installation is followed, it will be at C:\Program Files\RabbitMQ Server\rabbitmq_server-3.7.7\sbin location.
3. Click on the Address bar at the top and type cmd there to open a command prompt at that location. 
4. Type the following command:
5. PowerShell

    

   
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

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   rabbitmq-plugins.bat enable rabbitmq_management

   
   

   
   
6. Once it is done, kill/close this command prompt as well as the previous command window where rabbitMQ server was running.  
7. Run again the RabbitMQ server from the bat file that you have created on your Desktop.
8. Open http://localhost:15672/ You will be able to see the RabbitMQ Console:
9. 
10. Enter the user name and password as guest/guest.
11. You will be logged in and can see the RabbitMQ Console
    
    

Congratulations, you did it. :)

Please do share if this article helped you in someway or another. IF you face any challenge, do write me back, I will try to resolve your issue. If you have some suggestions/improvements for this article or some other solution worked for you, in that case as well, do write back, I will include your experience in this page so that others can get benifit from this. :)