chef-server-ctl reconfigure fails because of RabbitMQ

Question

According to the installation page on Opscode the install process of Chef Server 11 should be fairly easy. However, in my company, both me and a colleague of mine have run into the same problem when we tried to install Chef: running

$ sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure

would throw an error and stop:

"Error when reading /var/opt/chef-server/rabbitmq/.erlang.cookie: eacces"

How can I fix this problem?

Answer 1

Check the user/group that owns the erlang.cookie file indicated in the error message. The file should be owned by the user chef_server, so do

 $ chown chef_server:chef_server erlang.cookie

in that directory.