IronMQ On-Premise - Single Node Installation

This guide will show you how to install and configure a single, full featured IronMQ node. This is the first step to install your IronMA HA cluster.

1. Pull Docker images

IronMQ HA requires 2 major components running at all times. We provide docker images for both:

  • iron/mq - the core queue database
  • iron/auth - user & project storage, authentication and authorization

Download those docker images with the following:

docker pull iron/mq
docker pull iron/auth

2. Run the Docker images

Use the following commands to run the Docker images that you just pulled:

docker run --name=ironmq -d -p 8080:8080 --net=host iron/mq
docker run --name=ironauth -d -p 8090:8090 --net=host iron/auth

These commands start the queue database and auth server, respectively. If you’re familiar with Docker, you can run without --net=host, but you’ll have to point the iron/mq container to iron/auth with a different method. Please see configuration for more on that topic.

Additionally, there are a wide variety of Docker CLI flags that you can use to further customize. Please see the CLI reference for more details.

We’ve listed a few below:

  • -d runs as daemon, omit to run in foreground
  • -p HOST:CONTAINER binds to port on host machine
  • --net=host uses the host machine’s network interface

Note: when you’re ready to stop IronMQ, simply run:

docker stop ironmq
docker stop ironauth

Note: Data storage

As mentioned in other sections, IronMQ persists messages until they’ve been completely processed. In the above setup, user, project, message and other data are stored ephemerally inside the applicable containers.

That means that when you shut down the iron/mq container, for example, you will lose all unprocessed messages.

If you would like to persist the data, we suggest that you create a persistent data volume container that iron/mq mounts on startup. Below is a brief example. See the Docker documentation for more details.

# create the data container, mounted on host at /mnt/data
# note: ironmq and ironauth both store their data at /ironmq/data in container by default
docker run --name irondata -v /mnt/data:/ironmq/data busybox true
# run mq with data volume
docker run -d --volumes-from irondata -p 8080:8080 iron/mq

3. Create a new user and project

The IronMQ API requires a user token and a project ID to post a message onto the queue.

First, create a user:

docker run --net=host iron/authcli iron -t adminToken create user $USER_EMAIL $USER_PASSWORD

If this succeeded, you’ll see a log message that looks like this:

INFO[04-10|20:13:45] user created successfully                id=55282ef9b1a1940006000003 email=$USER_EMAIL token=$USER_TOKEN

Copy the $USER_TOKEN, then create a new project with it:

docker run --net=host iron/authcli iron -t $USER_TOKEN create project $PROJECT_NAME

Save your $USER_TOKEN and $PROJECT_NAME into an iron.json file or environment variables. The format of the file or variables is specified in the client libraries configuration file.

4. Post messages to IronMQ

You are now ready to use client libraries or APIs to enqueue and dequeue messages.

TODO: these links are broken

5. Next steps

You now have a single IronMQ node up and running. After you’re comfortable doing operations on your queues, we recommend that you read our instructions on setting up an HA cluster.

Support

If you find issues are problems during your setup, please contact us at support@iron.io and we’d be happy to help.