For those out there googling, this same erlang cookie error can happen when you are missing the HOME parameter from your environment configuration. For example, on the default ArchLinux installation of rabbitmq.

In this case, the service is started with systemctl start rabbitmq and it generates a cookie but the cli tools like rabbitmqctl status will not work out of the box because they do not know the home location.

default /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-env.conf

NODENAME=rabbit NODE_IP_ADDRESS=0.0.0.0 NODE_PORT=5672

LOG_BASE=/var/log/rabbitmq MNESIA_BASE=/var/lib/rabbitmq/mnesia modified /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-env.conf

NODENAME=rabbit NODE_IP_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1 NODE_PORT=5672

HOME=/var/lib/rabbitmq LOG_BASE=/var/log/rabbitmq MNESIA_BASE=/var/lib/rabbitmq/mnesia ref https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=191587