Welcome to the VerneMQ documentation! This is a reference guide for most of the available features and options of VerneMQ. The Getting Started guide might be a good entry point.

For a more general overview on VerneMQ and MQTT, you might want to start with the introduction.

For downloading VerneMQ see Downloads.

Installing VerneMQ

VerneMQ is a high-performance, distributed MQTT message broker. It scales horizontally and vertically on commodity hardware to support a high number of concurrent publishers and consumers while maintaining low latency and fault tolerance. To use it, all you need to do is install the VerneMQ package.

Choose your OS and follow the instructions:

• CentOS/RHEL

• Debian/Ubuntu

It is also possible to run VerneMQ using our Docker image:

• Docker

Starting VerneMQ

To start a VerneMQ broker, use the vernemq start command in your Shell:

vernemq start

A successful start will return no output. If there is a problem starting the broker, an error message is printed to STDERR.

To run VerneMQ with an attached interactive Erlang console:

vernemq console

A VerneMQ broker is typically started in console mode for debugging or troubleshooting purposes. Note that if you start VerneMQ in this manner, it is running as a foreground process that will exit when the console is closed.

You can close the console by issuing this command at the Erlang prompt:

q().

Once your broker has started, you can initially check that it is running with the vernemq ping command:

vernemq ping

The command will respond with pong if the broker is running or Node <NodeName> not responding to pings in case it’s not.

Every VerneMQ node has to be configured. Depending on the installation method and chosen platform the configuration file vernemq.conf resides at different locations. If VerneMQ was installed through a Linux package the default location for the configuration file is /etc/vernemq/vernemq.conf.

File Format

• A single setting is handled on one line.

• Lines are structured Key = Value

• Any line starting with # is a comment, and will be ignored

Minimal Quickstart configuration

You certainly want to try out VerneMQ right away. For that you could disable authentication like so:

• Set allow_anonymous = on

By default the vmq_acl authorization plugin is enabled and configured to allow publishing and subscribing to any topic, see here for more information.

Install VerneMQ

Once you have downloaded the binary package, execute the following command to install VerneMQ:

sudo dpkg -i vernemq-<VERSION>.bionic.x86_64.deb

Verify your installation

You can verify that VerneMQ is successfully installed by running:

dpkg -s vernemq | grep Status

If VerneMQ has been installed successfully Status: install ok installed is returned.

Activate VerneMQ node

Once you've installed VerneMQ, start it on your node:

service vernemq start

Default Directories and Paths

The whereis vernemq command will give you a couple of directories:

whereis vernemq
vernemq: /usr/sbin/vernemq /usr/lib/vernemq /etc/vernemq /usr/share/vernemq

Next Steps

Now that you've installed VerneMQ, check out How to configure VerneMQ.

Authentication

VerneMQ comes with a simple file-based password authentication mechanism which is enabled by default. If you don't need this it can be disabled by setting:

Per default VerneMQ doesn't accept any client that hasn't been configured using vmq-passwd. If you want to change this and accept any client connection you can set:

In a production setup we recommend to use the provided password based authentication mechanism or implement your own authentication plugins.

VerneMQ periodically checks the specified password file.

The check interval defaults to 10 seconds and can also be defined in the vernemq.conf.

Setting the password_reload_interval = 0 disables automatic reloading.

Manage Password Files for VerneMQ

How to use vmq-passwd

Options

-c

Creates a new password file. If the file already exists, it will be overwritten.

-D

Deletes the specified user from the password file.

-U

This option can be used to upgrade/convert a password file with plain text passwords into one using hashed passwords. It will modify the specified file. It does not detect whether passwords are already hashed, so using it on a password file that already contains hashed passwords will generate new hashes based on the old hashes and render the password file unusable. Note, with this option neither usernames or passwords may contain ":".

passwordfile

The password file to modify.

username

The username to add/update/delete.

Examples

Add a user to a new password file: (you can choose an arbitrary name for the password file, it only has to match the configuration in the VerneMQ configuration file).

Delete a user from a password file

Acknowledgements

The original version of vmq-passwd was developed by Roger Light (roger@atchoo.org).

vmq-passwd includes :

• software developed by the [OpenSSL
• cryptographic software written by Eric Young

  (eay@cryptsoft.com)

• software written by Tim Hudson (tjh@cryptsoft.com)

Authorization

VerneMQ comes with a simple ACL based authorization mechanism which is enabled by default. If you don't need this it can be disabled by setting:

VerneMQ periodically checks the specified ACL file.

The check interval defaults to 10 seconds and can also be defined in the vernemq.conf.

Setting the acl_reload_interval = 0 disables automatic reloading.

Managing the ACL entries

Topic access is added with lines of the format:

The access type is controlled using read or write. If not provided then read and write access is granted for the topic. The topic can use the MQTT subscription wildcards + or #.

The first set of topics are applied to all anonymous clients (assuming allow_anonymous = on). User specific ACLs are added after a user line as follows (this is the username not the client id):

It is also possible to define ACLs based on pattern substitution within the topic. The form is the same as for the topic keyword, but using pattern as the keyword.

The patterns available for substitution are:

• %c to match the client id of the client

• %u to match the username of the client

The substitution pattern must be the only text for that level of hierarchy. Pattern ACLs apply to all users even if the user keyword has previously been given.

Example:

Simple ACL Example

Anonymous users are allowed to

• publish & subscribe to topic bar.

• publish to topic foo.

• subscribe to topic all.

User john is allowed to

• publish & subscribe to topic foo.

• subscribe to topic baz.

• publish to topic all.

For OS Packages

Accepting the EULA for OS packages can be done by either changing the accept_eula line in the vernemq.conf file from no to yes or accepting the EULA the first time starting VerneMQ. In general, the installation of VerneMQ OS packages is now a 3 step process:

1. If you install the package with tools like dpkg (example: sudo dpkg -i vernemq-1.10.0.xenial.x86_64.deb), VerneMQ will install but will fail to start due to the missing EULA acceptance.

2. Accept the EULA by running sudo vernemq chkconfig or by adding the following line to your vernemq.conf file: accept_eula = yes.

3. Start/restart VerneMQ with: sudo systemctl restart vernemq.

For Docker Images

For Docker images the EULA can be accepted by setting the environment variableDOCKER_VERNEMQ_ACCEPT_EULA=yes, for Docker Swarm add DOCKER_VERNEMQ_ACCEPT_EULA: yes to the environment.

For the Helm chart the EULA for the Docker images can be accepted by extending the additionalEnv section with:

additionalEnv: - name: DOCKER_VERNEMQ_ACCEPT_EULA value: "yes"

env: - name: DOCKER_VERNEMQ_ACCEPT_EULA value: "yes"