MQTT

Allows publishing events through MQTT, ideal for IoT and lightweight streaming

Overview

MQTT is a lightweight, publish-subscribe protocol ideal for machine-to-machine communication in IoT environments.

Joule leverages MQTT to publish events through an MQTT publisher, allowing communication between devices and services over specified topics.

Client library: org.eclipse.paho:org.eclipse.paho.mqttv5.client:1.2.5

Examples & DSL attributes

This example configures an MQTT publisher to send events to the lab/humidity_valve topic.

The events are published as compressed JSON, using QoS level 1 for reliable delivery.

The publisher connects with the client ID humidityControllerPublisher, username joule and tenant uk to the broker at tcp://127.0.0.1:1883. Security is handled with a JWT claim using RSA encryption, with a private key stored in humidityControllerKeyFile.

mqttPublisher:
  clientId: humidityControllerPublisher
  username: joule
  tenant: uk
  topic: lab/humidity_valve
  qos: 1
  broker: tcp://127.0.0.1:1883

  serializer:
    compress: true

  security:
    jwtclaim:
      audienceId: humidityMonitorProject
      keyFile: humidityControllerKeyFile
      algorithm: RSA
      isPrivateKey: true

Attributes schema

Attribute	Description	Data Type	Required
name	Name of source stream	String
broker	Broker server address i.e. http://<ip-address>:port	String
topic	Message topic to subscribe too	List os topic strings
clientId	A unique client identifier on the server being connected too	String
username	Username	String
password	password	String
tenant	Namespace for created topics	String
qos	Quality of service	Integer Default: 0
auto reconnect	Automatically reconnect to broker on disconnection	Boolean Default: true
clean restart	This means that if a client disconnects and reconnects within 5 minutes with clean start= false,qos>1 then session state data ( e.g subscribed topics, queued messages) are retained	Boolean Default: true
session expiry interval	Maximum time that the broker will maintain the session within persistent storage when a client disconnects due to a process or network fault.	Long Default: 300 (seconds) 5 minutes
registration message	Message to send to broker when a Joule process registers	String
user properties	Sets the user properties	Map<String, String>
connection timeout	This value, measured in seconds, defines the maximum time interval the client will wait for the network connection to the MQTT server to be established	Integer Default: 30 (Seconds)
keepalive interval	This value, measured in seconds, defines the maximum time interval between messages sent or received. It enables the client to detect if the server is no longer available, without having to wait for the TCP/IP timeout	Integer Default: 30 (Seconds)
retained	Inform broker to retain last message. On a client reconnect to the broker it will receive the last published message	Boolean Default: false
append identifier	Append the Joule id and client id to the start of the publishing topic.	Boolean Default: false
message expiry interval	Time in seconds a published message is stored on the broker.	Long Default: 0
lwt notifier	Last will and testament notification specification	See Last will page
serializer	Serialisation configuration	See Serialisation attributes section
security	Security configuration	See Security documentation

Serialisation attributes schema

Attribute	Description	Data Type	Required
transform	User provided implementation	CustomTransformer
formatter	This is used when a custom transformer is not provided. Useful when chaining Joule processes	Formatter Default: jsonFormatter
compressed	Compress payload using Snappy	Boolean Default: false
batch	Flag to batch multiple messages in to a single payload	Boolean Default: false

Serialiser example

In this example, the MQTT publisher is configured to serialise StreamEvents as compressed JSON payloads.

The compress setting is enabled to reduce the size of the data and batch is set to false, meaning events are sent individually rather than in batches.

mqttPublisher:
  ...

  serializer:
    compress: true
    batch: false

Additional resources

• Official Mosquitto documentation
• Good user documentation
• MQTT X UI for testing