ActiveMQ Helm Chart

A Helm chart for deploying Apache ActiveMQ on Kubernetes.

Introduction

This chart bootstraps an Apache ActiveMQ broker deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager. It deploys ActiveMQ as a StatefulSet with persistent storage for the KahaDB message store.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.24+
• Helm 3.10+
• PV provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure (if persistence is enabled)

Installing the Chart

To install the chart with the release name my-activemq:

helm install my-activemq ./helm/activemq

To install with custom values:

helm install my-activemq ./helm/activemq -f my-values.yaml

Uninstalling the Chart

To uninstall/delete the my-activemq deployment:

helm uninstall my-activemq

Note: Uninstalling the chart does not delete PersistentVolumeClaims created by the StatefulSet. To delete them:

kubectl delete pvc -l app.kubernetes.io/instance=my-activemq

Configuration

General

Broker

Service

Web Console

Ingress

Persistence

Resources and Probes

Security

Availability

Monitoring

Scheduling

Extensibility

Accessing ActiveMQ

Web Console

The ActiveMQ Web Console is available on port 8161. To access it locally:

kubectl port-forward svc/my-activemq-web 8161:8161

Then open http://localhost:8161 in your browser and log in with the configured credentials (default: admin/admin).

Broker Connections

Applications can connect to ActiveMQ using the following protocols from within the cluster:

To connect from outside the cluster, use port-forwarding:

kubectl port-forward svc/my-activemq 61616:61616

Then connect to tcp://localhost:61616.

Custom Configuration

You can provide a custom activemq.xml directly in your values file:

broker:
  activemqXml: |
    <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
        http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core
        http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core/activemq-core.xsd">
      <broker xmlns="http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core"
              brokerName="localhost" dataDirectory="${activemq.data}">
        <!-- your custom configuration here -->
      </broker>
      <import resource="jetty.xml"/>
    </beans>

Similarly, you can customize jetty.xml and log4j2.properties via broker.jettyXml and broker.log4j2Properties.

See the examples/ directory for complete example values files:

• activemq-custom.yaml - Custom broker configuration with activemq.xml
• production.yaml - Production-ready settings with external secrets, ingress, and anti-affinity

Credentials

Credentials are stored in Kubernetes Secrets. For production, use existing secrets instead of plaintext values:

broker:
  credentials:
    existingSecret: "my-activemq-credentials"
  web:
    existingSecret: "my-activemq-web-credentials"

Create the secrets beforehand:

kubectl create secret generic my-activemq-credentials \
  --from-literal=connection-username=admin \
  --from-literal=connection-password=s3cur3p4ss

kubectl create secret generic my-activemq-web-credentials \
  --from-literal=web-username=admin \
  --from-literal=web-password=s3cur3p4ss

Persistence

The ActiveMQ image stores message data (KahaDB) at /opt/apache-activemq/data.

By default, the chart creates a PersistentVolumeClaim for each pod via the StatefulSet‘s volumeClaimTemplates. The volume is provisioned dynamically using the cluster’s default StorageClass.

To disable persistence (data will be lost on pod restart):

persistence:
  enabled: false

Monitoring

To enable Prometheus monitoring via the ServiceMonitor CRD:

serviceMonitor:
  enabled: true
  interval: 30s

This requires the Prometheus Operator to be installed in your cluster.