Let's say you have logged onto RabbitMQ as the rabbitmq user.

~]# whoami
rabbitmq

But when you issue the rabbitmq-plugins command, "Only root or rabbitmq can run rabbitmq-plugins" is being returned.

]# rabbitmq-plugins list
Only root or rabbitmq can run rabbitmq-plugins

This is a bug with the /usr/sbin/rabbitm-plugins file when running RabbitMQ on a container platform such as Docker or Red Hat OpenShift. In this scenario, using the full absolute path to the rabbitmq-plugins command should allow you to use the rabbitmq-plugins command.

/usr/lib/rabbitmq/bin/rabbitmq-plugins list