IBM MQ non-install images

IBM® MQ non-install images provide the IBM MQ product in a tar.gz format that can be unzipped and has no further installation steps. The purpose of this packaging of IBM MQ is to deliver the IBM MQ product in a format that can be used for building container images.

Note: These packages are provided only for building container images and are not supported for any other use cases.

Copies of these packages are provided with Developer, Non-Production and Production license terms for Linux® x86-64, Linux on IBM Z and Linux on PPCLE. The Github mq-container project is a working example with documentation on how to build a container image using these packages. It is made available under an Apache V2 license and may be copied and customized for your own purposes.

To download the packages, go to IBM MQ downloads and follow the link to the IBM MQ release specific download document. Production and Non-Production packages are on IBM Fix Central and the Developer packages are on IBM Downloads.

The main differences between the installable and non-install IBM MQ packages are as follows:

Security

The user that starts the queue manager will be the user that the queue manager is running as.
The primary group of the user starting the queue manager will be considered the administrative group rather than "mqm".
No setuid on any IBM MQ executables. IBM MQ executables are required to run as a non-root user.
It is no longer possible to authenticate incoming IBM MQ client users using local user credentials. IBM MQ is not authorized to access this operating system information, so only LDAP/UserExternal authorization can be used.

Install

(If you using the IBM MQ Operator on OpenShift®, this is handled transparently by the IBM MQ Operator.)

As no installer technology is used:

The installation is not registered with the operating system.
Initial data directory structures do not exist and should be created with <MQ_INSTALLATION_PATH>/bin/crtmqdir -a -f.

The product data directory is within the running user's home directory rather than /var/mqm. You can change the default directory of the data path by using the MQ_OVERRIDE_DATA_PATH environment variable.

Note: You must create the directory first, as the directory is not created automatically.

The setmqenv command can be used to initialize the current command environment, making it easier to work with the package.