A Helm chart for deploying Apache ActiveMQ on Kubernetes.

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.

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

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

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

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).

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.

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 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

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

To enable Prometheus monitoring via the ServiceMonitor CRD:

serviceMonitor:
  enabled: true
  interval: 30s

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