A standalone broker is one that is not part of a fabric. A standalone broker can, however, be part of a network of broker, a master/slave cluster, or a failover cluster. The distinction is that a standalone is responsible for managing and storing its own configuration.

All of the configuration changes are made directly on the local instance. You make changes using a combination of edits to local configuration template and commands from the console's config shell. The configuration template must be edited using an external editor. The configuration the control's the behavior of the broker's runtime container is changed using the console commands.

The default broker configuration template is etc/activemq.xml. You can the location of the configuration template by changing the config property in the broker's etc/org.fusesource.mq.fabric.server-default.cfg file.

The template can be edited using any text or XML editor.

The broker must be restarted for any changes in the template to take effect.

The initial values for all of the OSGi properties configuring the broker are specified in the etc/org.fusesource.mq.fabric.server-default.cfg file. You can edit these values using the command console's config shell. The PID for these values are org.fusesource.mq.fabric.server.id. The id is assigned by the container when the broker is started.

In addition to the broker's messaging behavior, a number of the broker's runtime behavior such as logging levels, the Web console behavior, and the JMX behavior are controlled by by OSGi properties stored in different PIDs.

To find the value for a broker's id use and the PIDs for the other runtime configuration settings, use the config:list command.

The config shell has a series of commands for editing OSGi properties:

For more information about the config shell commands, see Config Console Commands in Console Reference.