RabbitMQ + Erlang Client = Yay!

UPDATE: Read the second part at:  http://developingthedream.blogspot.com/2010/08/setting-up-queue-consumer-with.html

Creating a new erlang project based on the rabbitmq erlang client.
Please take these instructions with a giant grain of salt as I am still an erlang noob.
This is how I got started on my CentOS 5 machine.
I installed erlang via yum.
Everything else is installed manually.

First, create a proper folder structure for the new project. This seems to be pretty standard in some of the erlang projects I've seen so far:

project/
project/db/
project/deps/
project/ebin/
project/include/
project/src/

Then install the latest version of rabbitmq and the rabbitmq erlang client like so:

cd deps
hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-server
hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-codegen
hg clone http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-erlang-client
cd rabbitmq-server && make && cd ..
cd rabbitmq-erlang-client && make && cd ..
ln -s /path/to/project/deps/rabbitmq-server/ /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq_common
ln -s /path/to/project/deps/rabbitmq-server/ /usr/lib/erlang/lib/rabbitmq_erlang_client

This downloads and builds rabbitmq and the erlang client to the project's deps/ directory.
Then it links it to erlang's lib directory.

Now it's time to create a makefile to simplify building the code.

Makefile.am

.SUFFIXES: .erl .beam 
.erl.beam:  
erlc -W $< 

ERL = erl -pa ebin -boot start_sasl -s rabbit -mnesia dir 'db' 
ERLC = erlc -o ebin 
MODS = src/consumer.erl 
all:  
${ERLC} ${MODS} 
run:  
${ERL} 
clean:  
rm -rf ebin/*.beam erl_crash.dump 

Now we're ready to go and write a consumer using the erlang client, coming up next.