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.

VerneMQ supports the WebSocket protocol out of the box. To be able to open a WebSocket connection to VerneMQ, you have to configure a WebSocket listener or Secure WebSocket listener in the vernemq.conf file first:

listener.ws.default = 127.0.0.1:9001

listener.wss.default = 127.0.0.1:9002

Keep in mind that you'll use MQTT-over-WebSocket, so you will need a Javascript library that implements the MQTT client behaviour. We have used the Eclipse Paho client as well as MQTT.js

You won't be able to open WebSocket connections on a base URL, always add the /mqtt path.

Install VerneMQ

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

sudo yum install vernemq-<VERSION>.centos7.x86_64.rpm

or:

sudo rpm -Uvh vernemq-<VERSION>.centos7.x86_64.rpm

Activate VerneMQ node

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

Verify your installation

You can verify that VerneMQ is successfully installed by running:

If VerneMQ has been installed successfully vernemq is returned.

Next Steps

Now that you've installed VerneMQ, check out .

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 for more information.

Retry Interval

Set the time in seconds after a QoS=1 or QoS=2 message has been sent that VerneMQ will wait before retrying when no response is received.

retry_interval = 20

This option default to 20 seconds.

Inflight Messages

This option defines the maximum number of QoS 1 or 2 messages that can be in the process of being transmitted simultaneously.

Defaults to 20 messages, use 0 for no limit. The inflight window serves as a protection for sessions, on the incoming side.

Load Shedding

The maximum number of messages to hold in the queue above those messages that are currently in flight. Defaults to 1000. Set to -1 for no limit. This option protects a client session from overload by dropping messages (of any QoS).

Defaults to 1000 messages, use -1 for no limit. This parameter was named max_queued_messages in 0.10.*. Note that 0 will totally block message delivery from any queue!

This option specifies the maximum number of QoS 1 and 2 messages to hold in the offline queue.

Defaults to 1000 messages, use -1 for no limit, use 0 if no messages should be stored.

In contrast to the session based inflight window, max_online_messages and max_offline_messages serves as a protection of queues, on the outgoing side.

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:

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

Starting VerneMQ

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

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:

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:

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

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

Sometimes consumers get overwhelmed by the number of messages they receive. VerneMQ can load balance between multiple consumer instances subscribed to the same topic with the same ClientId.

Install VerneMQ

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

Verify your installation

You can verify that VerneMQ is successfully installed by running:

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:

Default Directories and Paths

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

Next Steps

Now that you've installed VerneMQ, check out .

Maximum Client Id Size

Set the maximum size for client ids, MQTT v3.1 specifies a limit of 23 characters.

max_client_id_size = 23

This option default to 23.

Persistent Client Expiration

This option allows persistent clients (those with clean_session set to false) to be removed if they do not reconnect within a certain time frame.

The expiration period should be an integer followed by one of h, d, w, m, y for hour, day, week, month, and year; or never:

This option defaults to never.

Message Size Limit

Limit the maximum publish payload size in bytes that VerneMQ allows. Messages that exceed this size won't be accepted.

Defaults to 0, which means that all valid messages are accepted. MQTT specification imposes a maximum payload size of 268435455 bytes.

The VerneMQ HTTP listener is used to serve various VerneMQ subsystems such as:

• Status page

• Prometheus metrics

• management API

By default it runs on port 8888. To disable the HTTP listener or change the port, adapt the configuration in vernemq.conf:

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:

Many aspects of VerneMQ can be extended using plugins. The standard VerneMQ package comes with several official plugins. You can show the enabled & running plugins via:

The command above displays all the enabled plugins together with the hooks they implement:

Enable a plugin

This enables the ACL plugin. Because the vmq_acl plugin is already started the above command won't succeed. In case the plugin sits in an external directory you must also to provide the --path=PathToPlugin.

Start a VerneMQ cluster node

Somtimes you need to configure a forwarding for ports (on a Mac for example):

This starts a new node that listens on 1883 for MQTT connections and on 8080 for MQTT over websocket connections. However, at this moment the broker won't be able to authenticate the connecting clients. To allow anonymous clients use the DOCKER_VERNEMQ_ALLOW_ANONYMOUS=on environment variable.

The systree functionality is enabled by default and reports the broker metrics at a fixed interval defined in the vernemq.conf. The metrics defined are transformed to MQTT topics e.g. mqtt_publish_received is transformed to $SYS/<nodename>/mqtt/publish/received. <nodename> is your node's name, as configured in the vernemq.conf. To find it, you can grep the file for it: grep nodename vernemq.conf

The complete list of metrics can be found

This option defaults to 20000 milliseconds.

Listeners specify on which IP address and port VerneMQ should accept new incoming connections. Depending on the chosen transport (TCP, SSL, WebSocket) different configuration parameters have to be provided. VerneMQ allows to write the listener configurations in a hierarchical manner, enabling very flexible setups. VerneMQ applies reasonable defaults on the top level, which can be of course overridden if needed.

These are the only default parameters that are applied for all transports, and the only one that are of interest for plain TCP and WebSocket listeners.

These global defaults can be overridden for a specific transport protocol listener.tcp.CONFIG = VAL, or even for a specific listener listener.tcp.LISTENER.CONFIG = VAL. The placeholder LISTENER is freely chosen and is only used as a reference for further configuring this particular listener.

Mountpoints

Normally, an MQTT broker hosts one single topic tree. This means that all topics are accessible to all publishers and subscribers (limited by the ACLs you configured, of course). Mountpoints are a way to host multiple topic trees in a single broker. They are completely separated and clients with different topic trees cannot publish messages to each other. This could be useful if you provide MQTT services to multiple separated use cases/verticals or clients, with a single broker. Note that mountpoints are configured via different listeners. As a consequence, the MQTT clients will have to connect to a specific port to connect to a specific topic space (mountpoint).

The mountpoints can be configured on the protocol level or configurred or overridden on the specific listener level.

Allowed protocol versions

Since VerneMQ 1.5.0 it is possible to configure which MQTT protocol versions as listener will accept.

VerneMQ supports MQTT 3.1, 3.1.1, and 5.0 (since VerneMQ 1.6.0). To allow these protocol versions, set:

Here 3,4,5 are the protocol level versions corresponding to MQTT 3.1, 3.1.1 and 5.0 respectively. The default value is 3,4 thus allowing MQTT 3.1 and 3.1.1, while MQTT 5.0 is disabled.

Sample Config

Listen on TCP port 1883 and for WebSocket Connections on port 8888:

An additional listener can be added by using a different name. In the example above the name equals to default and can be used for further configuring this particular listener. The following example demonstrates how an additional listener is defined as well as how the maximum number of connections can be limited for this listener:

PROXY protocol

VerneMQ listeners can be configured to accept connections from a proxy server that supports the PROXY protocol. This enables VerneMQ to retrieve peer information such as source IP/Port but also PROXY Version 2 protocol TLS client certificate details if the proxy was used to terminate TLS.

To enable the PROXY protocol for tcp listeners use listener.tcp.proxy_protocol = on or for a specific listener use listener.tcp.LISTENER.proxy_protocol = on.

If client certificates are used you can set listener.tcp.proxy_protocol_use_cn_as_username = on which will overwrite the MQTT username set by the client with the common name from the client certificate before authentication and authorization is performed.

Sample SSL Config

Accepting SSL connections on port 8883:

If you want to use client certificates to authenticate your clients you have to set the following option:

If you use client certificates and want to use the certificates CN value as a username you can set:

Both options require_certificate and use_identity_as_username default to off.

The same configuration options can be used for securing WebSocket connections, just use wss as the protocol identifier e.g. listener.wss.require_certificate.

VerneMQ can be easily clustered. Clients can then connect to any cluster node and receive messages from any other cluster nodes. However, the MQTT specification gives certain guarantees that are hard to fulfill in a distributed environment, especially when network partitions occur. We'll discuss the way VerneMQ deals with network partitions in its own subsection

A note on statefulness

Before you go ahead and experience the full power of clustering VerneMQ, be aware of its stateful character. An MQTT broker is a stateful application and a VerneMQ cluster is a stateful cluster.

What does this mean in detail? It means that clustered VerneMQ nodes will share information about connected clients and sessions but also meta-information about the cluster itself.

For instance, if you stop a cluster node, the VerneMQ cluster will not just forget about it. It will know that there's a node missing and it will keep looking for it. It will know there's a netsplit situation and it will heal the partition when the node comes back up. But if the missing nodes never comes back there's an eternal netsplit. (still resolvable by making the missing nodes explicitly leave).

This doesn't mean that a VerneMQ cluster cannot dynamically grow and shrink. But it means you have to tell the cluster what you intend to do, by using join and leave commands.

If you want a cluster node to leave the cluster, well... use the vmq-admin cluster leave command. If you want a node to join a cluster, well... use the vmq-admin cluster join command.

Makes sense? Go ahead and create your first VerneMQ cluster!

Joining a Cluster

Leaving a Cluster

Detailed Cluster Leave, Case A: Make a live node leave

A cluster leave will actually do a lot more work, and gives you some options to choose. The node leaving the cluster will go to great length trying to migrate its existing queues to other nodes. As queues (online or offline) are live processes in a VerneMQ node, it will only exit after it has migrated them.

Let's look at the steps in detail:

1. vmq-admin cluster leave node=<NodeThatShouldGo>

This first step will only stop the MQTT Listeners of the node to ensure that no new connections are accepted. It will not interrupt the existing connections, and behind the scenes the node will not leave the cluster yet. Existing clients are still able to publish and receive messages at this point.

The idea is to give a grace period with the hope that existing clients might re-connect (to another node). If you have decided that this period is over (after 5 minutes or 1 day is up to you), you proceed with step 2: disconnecting the rest of the clients.

1. vmq-admin cluster leave node=<NodeThatShouldGo> -k

The -k flag will delete the MQTT Listeners of the leaving node, taking down all live connections. If this is what you want from the beginning, you can do this right away as a first step.

Now, queue migration is triggered by clients re-connecting to other nodes. They will claim their queue and it will get migrated. Still, there might be some offline queues remaining on the leaving node, because they were pre-existing or because some clients do not re-connect and do not reclaim their queues.

VerneMQ will throw an exception if there are remaining offline queues after a configurable timeout. The default is 60 seconds, but you can set it as an option to the cluster leave command. As soon as the exception shows in console or console.log, you can actually retry the cluster leave command (including setting a migration timeout (-t), and an interval in seconds (-i) indicating how often information on the migration progress should be printed to the console.log):

1. vmq-admin cluster leave node=<NodeThatShouldGo> -k -i 5 -t 120

After this timeout VerneMQ will forcefully migrate the remaining offline queues to other cluster nodes in a round robin manner. After doing that, it will stop the leaving VerneMQ node.

Detailed Cluster Leave, Case B: Make a stopped node leave

So, case A was the happy case. You left the cluster with your node in a controlled manner, and everything worked, including a complete queue (and message) transfer to other nodes.

Let's look at the second possibility where the node is already down. Your cluster is still counting on it though and possibly blocking new subscription for that reason, so you want to make the node leave.

To do this, use the same command(s) as in the first case. There is one important consequence to note: by making a stopped node leave, you basically throw away persistant queue content, as VerneMQ won't be able to migrate or deliver it.

Let's repeat that to make sure:

Getting Cluster Status Information

Console Logging

Where should VerneMQ emit the default console log messages (which are typically at info severity):

log.console = off | file | console | both

VerneMQ defaults to log the console messages to a file, which can specified by:

This option defaults to /var/log/vernemq/console.log for Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL and Docker installs.

The default console logging level info could be setting one of the following:

Error Logging

VerneMQ log error messages by default. One can change the default behaviour by setting:

VerneMQ defaults to log the error messages to a file, which can specified by:

This option defaults to /var/log/vernemq/error.log for Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL and Docker installs.

Crash Logging

VerneMQ log crash messages by default. One can change the default behaviour by setting:

VerneMQ defaults to log the crash messages to a file, which can specified by:

This option defaults to /var/log/vernemq/crash.log for Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL and Docker installs.

The maximum sizes in bytes of inidividual messages in the crash log defaults to 64KB but can be specified by:

VerneMQ rotate crash logs. By default, the crash log file is rotated at midnight or when the size exceeds 10MGB. This behaviour can be changed by setting:

The default number of rotated log files is 5 and can be set with the option:

SysLog

VerneMQ supports logging to SysLog, enable it by setting:

Logging to SysLog is disabled by default.

In this section the subscription flow is described. VerneMQ provides several hooks to intercept the subscription flow. The most important ones are the auth_on_subscribe and auth_on_subscribe_m5 hooks which act as an application level firewall granting or rejecting subscribe requests.

auth_on_subscribe and auth_on_subscribe_m5

The auth_on_subscribe and auth_on_subscribe_m5 hooks allow your plugin to grant or reject subscribe requests sent by a client. They also makes it possible to rewrite the subscribe topic and qos. The auth_on_subscribe hook is specified in the Erlang behaviour and the auth_on_subscribe hook in the behaviour available in the repo.

on_subscribe and on_subscribe_m5

The on_subscribe and on_subscribe_m5 hooks allow your plugin to get informed about an authorized subscribe request. The on_subscribe hook is specified in the Erlang behaviour and the on_subscribe_m5 hook in the behaviour available in the repo.

on_unsubscribe and on_unsubscribe_m5

The on_unsubscribe and on_unsubscribe_m5 hooks allow your plugin to get informed about an unsubscribe request. They also allow you to rewrite the unsubscribe topic if required. The on_subscribe hook is specified in the Erlang behaviour and the on_unsubscribe_m5 hook in the behaviour available in the repo.

VerneMQ uses Google's LevelDB as a fast storage backend for messages and subscriber information. Each VerneMQ node runs its own embedded LevelDB store.

Configuration of LevelDB memory

There's not much you need to know about LevelDB and VerneMQ. One really important thing to note is that LevelDB manages its own memory. This means that VerneMQ will not allocate and free memory for LevelDB. Instead you'll have to configure a configuration value in vernemq.conf that tells LevelDB how much memory it can use up.

Configuring LevelDB memory:

VerneMQ comes with a built-in status page which by default is enabled and is available on http://localhost:8888/status, see .

The status page is a simple overview of the cluster and the individual nodes in the cluster as seen below:

A simple way to gauge the health of a VerneMQ cluster is to query the /health path on the .

The health check will return 200 when VerneMQ is accepting connections and is joined with the cluster (for clustered setups). 503 will be returned in case any of those two conditions are not met.

On every VerneMQ node you'll find the vmq-admin command line tool in the release's bin directory. It has different sub-commands that let you check for status, start and stop listeners, re-configure values and a couple of other administrative tasks.

VerneMQ uses the Erlang distribution mechanism for most inter-node communication. VerneMQ identifies other machines in the cluster using Erlang identifiers (e.g. [email protected]). Erlang resolves these node identifiers to a TCP port on a given machine via the Erlang Port Mapper daemon (epmd) running on each cluster node.

By default, epmd binds to TCP port 4369 and listens on the wildcard interface. For inter-node communication, Erlang uses an unpredictable port by default; it binds to port 0, which means the first available port.

For ease of firewall configuration, VerneMQ can be configured to instruct the Erlang interpreter to use a limited range of ports. For example, to restrict the range of ports that Erlang will use for inter-Erlang node communication to 6000-7999, add the following lines to vernemq.conf on each VerneMQ node:

erlang.distribution.port_range.minimum = 6000
erlang.distribution.port_range.maximum = 7999

The settings above are only used for distributing subscription updates and maintenance messages. For distributing the 'real' MQTT messages the proper vmq listener must be configured in the vernemq.conf.

listener.vmq.clustering = 0.0.0.0:44053

Attributions:

This section, "VerneMQ Inter-node Communication", is a derivative of Security and Firewalls by Riak, used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

You can dynamically re-configure most of VerneMQ's settings on a running node by using the vmq-admin set command.

The following config values can be handled dynamically:

Setting a value for the local node

Let's change the max_client_id_size as an example. (We might have noticed that some clients can't login because their client ID is too long, but we don't want to restart the broker for that). Note that you can also set multiple values with the same command.

Setting a value for an arbitrary cluster node

Setting a value for all cluster nodes

Show current VerneMQ config values

For the local node

You can show one or multiple values in a simple table:

For an arbitrary node

For all cluster nodes

This section elaborates how a VerneMQ cluster deals with network partitions (aka. netsplit or split brain situation). A netsplit is mostly the result of a failure of one or more network devices resulting in a cluster where nodes can no longer reach each other.

VerneMQ is able to detect a network partition, and by default it will stop serving CONNECT, PUBLISH, SUBSCRIBE, and UNSUBSCRIBE requests. A properly implemented client will always resend unacked commands and messages are therefore not lost (QoS 0 publishes will be lost). However, the time window between the network partition and the time VerneMQ detects the partition much can happen. Moreover, this time frame will be different on every participating cluster node. In this guide we're referring to this time frame as the Window of Uncertainty.

Possible Scenario for Message Loss:

VerneMQ follows an eventually consistent model for storing and replicating the subscription data. This also includes retained messages.

Due to the eventually consistent data model it is possible that during the Window of Uncertainty a publish won't take into account a subscription made on a remote node (in another partition). Obviously, VerneMQ can't deliver the message in this case. The same holds for delivering retained messages to remote subscribers.

last will messages that are triggered during the Window of Uncertainty will be delivered to the reachable subscribers. Currently during a netsplit, but after the Window of Uncertainty last will messages will be lost.

Possible Scenario for Duplicate Clients:

Normally, client registration is synchronized using an elected leader node for the given client id. Such a synchronization removes the race condition between multiple clients trying to connect with the same client id on different nodes. However, during the Window of Uncertainty it is currently possible that VerneMQ fails to disconnect a client connected to a different node. Although this scenario sounds like artificially crafted it is possible to end up with duplicate clients connected to the cluster.

Recovering from a Netsplit

As soon as the partition is healed, and connectivity reestablished, the VerneMQ nodes replicate the latest changes made to the subscription data. This includes all the changes 'accidentally' made during the Window of Uncertainty. Using VerneMQ ensures that convergence regarding subscription data and retained messages is eventually reached.

To list the retained messages simply invoke vmq-admin retain show:

$ vmq-admin retain show
+------------------+----------------+
|     payload      |     topic      |
+------------------+----------------+
| a-third-message  | a/third/topic  |
|some-other-message|some/other/topic|
|    a-message     |   some/topic   |
|    a-message     | another/topic  |
+------------------+----------------+

Besides listing the retained messages it is also possible to filter them:

$ vmq-admin retain show --payload --topic=some/topic
+---------+
| payload |
+---------+
|a-message|
+---------+

In the above example we list only the payload for the topic some/topic.

Another example where all topics are list with retained messages with a specific payload:

See the full set of options and documentation by invoking vmq-admin retain show --help.

A shared subscription is a mechanism for distributing messages to a set of subscribers to shared subscription topic, such that each message is received by only one subscriber. This contrasts with normal subscriptions where each subscriber will receive a copy of the published message.

A shared subscription is on the form $share/sharename/topic and subscribers to this topic will receive messages published to the topic topic. The messages will be distributed according to the defined distribution policy.

Introduction

When working with a system like VerneMQ sometimes when troubleshooting it would be nice to know what a client is actually sending and receiving and what VerneMQ is doing with this information. For this purpose VerneMQ has a built-in tracing mechanism which is safe to use in production settings as there is very little overhead in running the tracer and has built-in protection mechanisms to stop traces that produce too much information.

In this section the publish flow is described. VerneMQ provides multiple hooks throughout the flow of a message. The most important ones are the auth_on_publish and auth_on_publish_m5 hooks which acts as an application level firewall granting or rejecting a publish message.

auth_on_publish and auth_on_publish_m5

The auth_on_publish

The Prometheus exporter is enabled by default and installs an HTTP handler on http://localhost:8888/metrics. To read more about configuring the HTTP listener, see .

Example Scrape Config

Add the following configuration to the scrape_configs section inside prometheus.yml of your Prometheus server.

You can configure as many listeners as you wish in the vernemq.conf file. In addition to this, the vmq-admin listener command let's you configure, start, stop and delete listeners on the fly. Those can be MQTT, WebSocket or Cluster listeners, in the command line output they will be tagged mqtt, ws or vmq accordingly.

The graphite exporter reports the broker metrics at a fixed interval (defined in milliseconds) to a graphite server. The necessary configuration is done inside the vernemq.conf.

You can further tune the connection to the Graphite server:

There are a couple of hidden options you can set in the vernemq.conf file. Hidden means that you have to add and set the value explicitly. Hidden options still have default values. Changing them should be considered advanced, possibly with the exception of setting a max_message_rate.

Queue Deliver mode

Specify how the queue should deliver messages when multiple sessions are allowed. In case of fanout all the attached sessions will receive the message, in case of balance

We recommend to use the rebar3 toolchain to generate the basic Erlang OTP application boilerplate and start from there.

Change the rebar.config file to include the vernemq_dev dependency:

Compile the application, this will automatically fetch vernemq_dev.

Now you're ready to implement the hooks. Don't forget to add the proper vmq_plugin_hooks entries to your src/myplugin.app.src file.

For a complete example, see the

You can loadtest VerneMQ with our . It is based on Machinezone's very powerful and lets you narrow down what hardware specs are needed to meet your performance goals. You can state your requirements for latency percentiles (and much more) in a formal way, and let vmq_mzbench automatically fail, if it can't meet the requirements.

If you have an AWS account, vmq_mzbench can automagically provision worker nodes for you. You can also run it locally, of course.

1. Install MZBench

Please follow the

VerneMQ supports flows or SASL style authentication for MQTT 5.0 sessions. The enhanced authentication mechanism can be used for initial authentication when the client connects or to re-authenticate clients at a later point.

The on_auth_m5 hook allows the plugin to implement SASL style authentication flows by either accepting, rejecting (disconnecting the client) or continue the flow. The on_auth_m5 hook is specified in the Erlang behaviour in the repo.

VerneMQ can be monitored in several ways. We implemented native support for , , and .

The metrics are also available via the command line tool:

Or with:

Which will output the metrics together with a short description describing what the metric is about. An example looks like:

Notice that the metrics:

Are no longer used (always 0) and will be removed in the future. They were replaced with mqtt_connack_sent using the return_code label. For MQTT 5.0 the reason_code label is used instead.

VerneMQ provides multiple hooks throughout the lifetime of a session. The most important ones are the auth_on_register and auth_on_register_m5 hooks which act as an application level firewall granting or rejecting new clients.

auth_on_register and auth_on_register_m5

The auth_on_register and auth_on_register_m5 hooks allow your plugin to grant or reject new client connections. Moreover it lets you exert fine grained control over the configuration of the client session. The auth_on_register hook is specified in the Erlang behaviour and the auth_on_register_m5 hook in the behaviour available in the repo.

Every plugin that implements the auth_on_register or auth_on_register_m5 hooks are part of a conditional plugin chain. For this reason we allow the hook to return different values depending on how the plugin grants or rejects this client. In case the plugin doesn't know the client it is best to return next as this would allow subsequent plugins in the chain to validate this client. If no plugin is able to validate the client it gets automatically rejected.

on_auth_m5

The on_auth_m5 hook allows your plugin to implement MQTT enhanced authentication, see .

on_register and on_register_m5

The on_register and on_register_m5 hooks allow your plugin to get informed about a newly authenticated client. The hook is specified in the Erlang behaviour and the behaviour available in the repo.

on_client_wakeup

Once a new client was successfully authenticated and the above described hooks have been called, the client attaches to its queue. If it is a returning client using clean_session=false or if the client had previous sessions in the cluster, this process could take a while. (As offline messages are migrated to a new node, existing sessions are disconnected). The hook is called at the point where a queue has been successfully instantiated, possible offline messages migrated, and potential duplicate sessions have been disconnected. In other words: when the client has reached a completely initialized, normal state for accepting messages. The hook is specified in the Erlang behaviour on_client_wakeup_hook available in the repo.

on_client_offline

This hook is called if an MQTT 3.1/3.1.1 client using clean_session=false or an MQTT 5.0 client with a non-zero session_expiry_interval closes the connection or gets disconnected by a duplicate client. The hook is specified in the Erlang behaviour available in the repo.

on_client_gone

This hook is called if an MQTT 3.1/3.1.1 client using clean_session=true or an MQTT 5.0 client with the session_expiry_interval set to zero closes the connection or gets disconnected by a duplicate client. The hook is specified in the Erlang behaviour available in the repo.

Sometimes you want to have a quick way to test a cluster on your development machine as a VerneMQ developer.

You need to take care of a couple things if you want to run multiple VerneMQ instances on the same machine. There is a make option that let's you build multiple releases, as a commodity, taking care of all the configuration.

First, build a normal release (this is just needed the first time) with:

➜ default git:(master) ✗ make rel

The following command will then prepare 3 correctly configured vernemq.conf files, with different ports for the MQTT listeners etc. It will also build 3 full VerneMQ releases.

➜ default git:(master) ✗ make dev1 dev2 dev3

Check if you have the 3 new releases in the _build directory of your VerneMQ code repo.

You can then start the respective broker instances in 3 terminal windows, by using the respective commands and directory paths. Example:

➜ (_build/dev2/rel/vernemq/bin) ✗ vernemq console

The MQTT listeners will of course be configured differently for each node (the default 1883 port is not used, so that you can still run a default MQTT broker besides your dev nodes). A couple of other ports are also adapted (HTTP status page, cluster communication). The MQTT ports are automically configured in increasing steps of 50: (if in doubt, consult the respective vernemq.conf files)

Note that the dev nodes are not automatically clustered. You still need to manually cluster them with commands like the following:

➜ (_build/dev2/rel/vernemq/bin) ✗ vmq-admin cluster join [email protected]

General relation to OS configuration values

You need to know about and configure a couple of Operating System and Erlang VM configs to operate VerneMQ efficiently. First, make sure you have set appropriate OS file limits according to our . Second, when you run into performance problems, don't forget to check the . (Can't open more than 10k connections? Well, is the listener configured to open more than 10k?)

VerneMQ is implemented in Erlang OTP and therefore runs on top of the Erlang VM. For this reason plugins have to be developed in a programming language that runs on the Erlang VM. The most popular choice is obviously the Erlang programming language itself, but Elixir or Lisp flavoured Erlang LFE could be used too.

This guide explains the different flows that expose different hooks to be used for custom plugins. It also describes the code structure a plugin must comply to in order to be successfully loaded and started by the VerneMQ plugin mechanism.

All the hooks that are currently exposed fall into one of three categories.

1. Hooks that allow you to change the protocol flow. An example could be to authenticate a client using the auth_on_register hook.

2. Hooks that inform you about a certain action, that could be used for example to implement a custom logging or audit plugin.

3. Hooks that are called given a certain condition

Notice that some hooks come in two variants, for example the auth_on_register and then auth_on_register_m5 hooks. The _m5 postfix refers to the fact that this hook is only invoked in an MQTT 5.0 session context whereas the other is invoked in a MQTT 3.1/3.1.1 session context.

Before going into the details, let's give a quick intro to the VerneMQ plugin system.

Plugin System

The VerneMQ plugin system allows you to load, unload, start and stop plugins during runtime, and you can even upgrade a plugin during runtime. To make this work it is required that the plugin is an OTP application and strictly follows the rules of implementing the Erlang OTP application behaviour. It is recommended to use the rebar3 toolchain to compile the plugin. VerneMQ comes with built-in support for the directory structure used by rebar3.

Every plugin has to describe the hooks it is implementing as part of its application environment file. The vmq_acl plugin for instance comes with the application environment file below:

Lines 6 to 10 instruct the plugin system to ensure that those dependent applications are loaded and started. If you're using third party dependencies make sure that they are available in compiled form and part of the plugin load path. Lines 16 to 20 allow the plugin system to compile the plugin rules. Yes, you've heard correctly. The rules are compiled into Erlang VM code to make sure the lookup and execution of plugin code is as fast as possible. Some hooks exist which are used internally such as the change_config/1, we'll describe those at some other point.

The environment value for vmq_plugin_hooks is a list of hooks. A hook is specified by {Module, Function, Arity, Options}.

To streamline the plugin development we provide a different Erlang behaviour for every hook a plugin implements. Those behaviours are part of the vernemq_dev library application, which you should add as a dependency to your plugin. vernemq_dev also comes with a header file that contains all the type definitions used by the hooks.

Chaining

It is possible to have multiple plugins serving the same hook. Depending on the hook the plugin chain is used differently. The most elaborate chains can be found for the hooks that deal with authentication and authorization flows. We also call them conditional chains as a plugin can give control away to the next plugin in the chain. The image show a sample plugin chain for the auth_on_register hook.

Most hooks don't require conditions and are mainly used as event handlers. In this case all plugins in a chain are called. An example for such a hook would be the on_register hook.

A rather specific case is the need to call only one plugin instead of iterating through the whole chain. VerneMQ uses such hooks for it's pluggable message storage system.

Unless you're implementing your custom message storage backend, you probably won't need this style of hook.

Startup

The plugin mechanism uses the application environment file to infer the applications that it has to load and start prior to starting the plugin itself. It internally uses the application:ensure_all_started/1 function call to start the plugin. If your setup is more complex you could override this behaviour by implementing a custom start/0 function inside a module that's named after your plugin.

Teardown

The plugin mechanism uses application:stop/1 to stop and unload the plugin. This won't stop the dependent application started at startup. If you rely on third party applications that aren't started as part of the VerneMQ release, e.g. a database driver, you can implement a custom stop/0 function inside a module that's named after your plugin and properly stop the driver there.

Public Type Specs

The vmq_types.hrl exposes all the type specs used by the hooks. The following types are used by the plugin system:

Bridges are a non-standard way, although kind of a de-facto standard among MQTT broker implementations, to connect two different MQTT brokers to eachother. This allows for example that a topic tree of a remote broker becomes part of the topic tree on the local broker. VerneMQ supports plain TCP connections as well as SSL connections.

Enabling the bridge functionality

in VerneMQ the bridge is distributed with VerneMQ as a plugin and is not enabled by default. After configuring the bridge as described below, make sure to enable the plugin by setting:

See Managing plugins for more information on working with plugins.

When the plugin is enabled a simple status interface is available:

Sample MQTT Bridge

Setup a bridge to a remote broker:

Different connection parameters can be set:

Define the topics the bridge should incorporate in its local topic tree (by subscribing to the remote), or the topics it should export to the remote broker (by publishing to the remote). We share a similar configuration syntax to that used by the Mosquitto broker:

topic defines a topic pattern that is shared between the two brokers. Any topics matching the pattern (which may include wildcards) are shared. The second parameter defines the direction that the messages will be shared in, so it is possible to import messages from a remote broker using in, export messages to a remote broker using out or share messages in both directions. If this parameter is not defined, VerneMQ defaults to out. The QoS level defines the publish/subscribe QoS level used for this topic and defaults to 0. (Source: mosquitto.conf)

The local-prefix and remote-prefix can be used to prefix incoming or outgoing publish messages.

A simple example:

Sample MQTT Bridge that uses SSL/TLS

SSL bridges support the same configuration parameters as TCP bridges, but need further instructions for handling the SSL specifics:

Inspecting sessions

VerneMQ comes with powerful tools for inspecting the state of MQTT sessions. To list current MQTT sessions simply invoke vmq-admin session show:

To see detailed information about the command see vmq-admin session show --help.

The command is able to show a lot of different information about a client, for example the client id, the peer host and port if the client is online or offline and much more, see vmq-admin session show --help for details. Further the information can also be used to filter information which is very helpful when wanting to narrow down the information to a single client.

A sample query which lists only the node where the client session exists and if the client is online would look like the following:

More examples

Listing the clients and the subscriptions one can do the following:

And to list only the clients subscribed to the topic some/topic:

To figure out when the queue for a persisted session (clean_session=false) was created and when the client last connected one can use the --queue_started_at and --session_started_at to list the POSIX timestamps (in microseconds):

Besides the examples above it is also possible to inspect the number of online or offline messages as well as their payloads and much more. See vmq-admin session show --help for an exhaustive list of all the available options.

Managing sessions

VerneMQ also supports disconnecting clients and reauthorizing client subscriptions. To disconnect a client and cleanup store messages and remove subscriptions one can invoke:

See vmq-admin session disconnect --help for more options and details.

To reauthorize subscriptions for a client issue the following command:

This works by reapplying the logic in any installed auth_on_subscribe or auth_on_subscribe_m5 plugin hooks to check the validity of the existing topics and removing those that are no longer allowed. In the example above the reauthorization of the client subscriptions resulted in no changes.

Introduction and general setup

VerneMQ supports authentication and authorization using a number of popular databases and the below sections describe how to configure the different databases.

The database drivers are handled using the vmq_diversity plugin and it therefore needs to be enabled:

A typical VerneMQ deployment could from a high level look like the following:

In this scenario MQTT clients connect from the internet and are authenticated and authorized against the Authentication Management Service and publish and receive messages, either with each other or with the Backend-Services which might be responsible for sending control messages to the clients or storing and forwarding messages to other systems or databases for later processing.

To build and deploy a system such as the above a lot of decisions has to be made. These can concern how to do authentication and authorization, where to do TLS termination, how the load balancer should be configured (if one is needed at all), what the MQTT architecture and topic trees should look and how and to what level the system can/should scale. To simplify the following discussion we'll set a few requirements:

VerneMQ can consume a large number of open file handles when thousands of clients are connected as every connection requires at least one file handle.

Most operating systems can change the open-files limit using the ulimit -n command. Example:

However, this only changes the limit for the current shell session. Changing the limit on a system-wide, permanent basis varies more between systems.

Linux

On most Linux distributions, the total limit for open files is controlled by sysctl.

As seen above, it is generally set high enough for VerneMQ. If you have other things running on the system, you might want to consult the manpage for how to change that setting. However, what most needs to be changed is the per-user open files limit. This requires editing /etc/security/limits.conf, for which you'll need superuser access. If you installed VerneMQ from a binary package, add lines for the vernemq user like so, substituting your desired hard and soft limits:

On Ubuntu, if you’re always relying on the init scripts to start VerneMQ, you can create the file /etc/default/vernemq and specify a manual limit like so:

This file is automatically sourced from the init script, and the VerneMQ process started by it will properly inherit this setting. As init scripts are always run as the root user, there’s no need to specifically set limits in /etc/security/limits.conf if you’re solely relying on init scripts.

On CentOS/RedHat systems, make sure to set a proper limit for the user you’re usually logging in with to do any kind of work on the machine, including managing VerneMQ. On CentOS, sudo properly inherits the values from the executing user.

Enable PAM-Based Limits for Debian & Ubuntu

It can be helpful to enable PAM user limits so that non-root users, such as the vernemq user, may specify a higher value for maximum open files. For example, follow these steps to enable PAM user limits and set the soft and hard values for all users of the system to allow for up to 65536 open files.

Edit /etc/pam.d/common-session and append the following line:

If /etc/pam.d/common-session-noninteractive exists, append the same line as above.

Save and close the file.

Edit /etc/security/limits.conf and append the following lines to the file:

1. Save and close the file.

2. (optional) If you will be accessing the VerneMQ nodes via secure shell (ssh), you should also edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and uncomment the following line:

and set its value to yes as shown here:

1. Restart the machine so that the limits to take effect and verify

   that the new limits are set with the following command:

Enable PAM-Based Limits for CentOS and Red Hat

1. Edit /etc/security/limits.conf and append the following lines to

   the file:

1. Save and close the file.

2. Restart the machine so that the limits to take effect and verify that the new limits are set with the following command:

Solaris

In Solaris 8, there is a default limit of 1024 file descriptors per process. In Solaris 9, the default limit was raised to 65536. To increase the per-process limit on Solaris, add the following line to /etc/system:

Reference:

Mac OS X

To check the current limits on your Mac OS X system, run:

The last two columns are the soft and hard limits, respectively.

To adjust the maximum open file limits in OS X 10.7 (Lion) or newer, edit /etc/launchd.conf and increase the limits for both values as appropriate.

For example, to set the soft limit to 16384 files, and the hard limit to 32768 files, perform the following steps:

1. Verify current limits:

   The response output should look something like this:

2. Edit (or create) /etc/launchd.conf and increase the limits. Add lines that look like the following (using values appropriate to your environment):

Attributions

This work, "Open File Limits", is a derivative of Open File Limits by Riak, used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. "Open File Limits" is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License by Erlio GmbH.

The VerneMQ HTTP API is enabled by default and installs an HTTP handler on http://localhost:8888/api/v1. To read more about configuring the HTTP listener, see . You can configure a HTTP listener, or a HTTPS listener to serve the HTTP API v1.

Managing API keys

The VerneMQ HTTP API uses basic authentication where an API key is passed as the username and the password is left empty. So the first step to us the HTTP API is to create an API key:

The key is persisted and available on all cluster nodes.

Intro

Kubernetes (K8s) is possibly the most mature technology for deploying Docker containers at scale. While running a single Docker container is supposed to be easy, running a Kubernetes cluster definitely isn't. That's why we recommended to work with a certified Kubernetes partner such as , , , or .

If your applications already live in Docker containers and are deployed on Kubernetes it can be beneficial to also run VerneMQ on Kubernetes. This guide covers how to successfully deploy a VerneMQ cluster on Kubernetes. Multiple options exist to deploy a VerneMQ cluster at this point. This guide describes how to use the official Helm chart as well as the still experimental Kubernetes Operator.

Developing VerneMQ plugins in Erlang is the most powerful way to extend the functionality of a VerneMQ broker but is a barrier developers not familiar with Erlang. For this reason we've implemented a VerneMQ extension that allows you to develop plugins using the Lua scripting language. This extension is called vmq_diversity and is shipped as part of VerneMQ.

Moreover vmq_diversity provides simple Lua libraries to communicate with MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis within your Lua VerneMQ plugins. An additional Json encoding/decoding library as well as a generic HTTP client library provide your Lua scripts a great way to talk to external services.

Configuration

To enable vmq_diversity make sure to set:

To specify a script to load when VerneMQ starts can be done like this:

It is also possible to dynamically load a Lua script using vmq-admin:

To reload a script after a change:

Implementing a VerneMQ plugin

A VerneMQ plugin typically consists of one or more implemented VerneMQ hooks. We tried to keep the differences between the traditional Erlang based and Lua based plugins as small as possible. Please check out the for more information about the different flows and a description of the different hooks.

Your first Lua plugin

Let's start with a first very basic example that implements a basic authentication and authorization scheme.

Data Providers

This subsection describes the data providers currently available to a Lua script. Every data provider is backed by a connection pool that has to be configured by your script.

MySQL

ensure_pool

Ensures that the connection pool named config.pool_id is setup in the system. The config argument is a Lua table holding the following keys:

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool (mandatory).

• size: Size of the connection pool (default is 5).

• user: MySQL account name for login

This call throws a badarg error in case it cannot setup the pool otherwise it returns true.

execute

Executes the provided SQL statement using a connection from the connection pool.

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool to use for this statement.

• stmt: A valid MySQL statement.

• args...: A variable number of arguments can be passed to substitute statement parameters.

Depending on the statement this call returns true or false or a Lua array containing the resulting rows (as Lua tables). In case the statement cannot be executed a badarg error is thrown.

PostgreSQL

ensure_pool

Ensures that the connection pool named config.pool_id is setup in the system. The config argument is a Lua table holding the following keys:

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool (mandatory).

• size: Size of the connection pool (default is 5).

• user: Postgres account name for login

This call throws a badarg error in case it cannot setup the pool otherwise it returns true.

execute

Executes the provided SQL statement using a connection from the connection pool.

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool to use for this statement.

• stmt: A valid MySQL statement.

• args...: A variable number of arguments can be passed to substitute statement parameters.

Depending on the statement this call returns true or false or a Lua array containing the resulting rows (as Lua tables). In case the statement cannot be executed a badarg error is thrown.

MongoDB

ensure_pool

Ensures that the connection pool named config.pool_id is setup in the system. The config argument is a Lua table holding the following keys:

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool (mandatory).

• size: Size of the connection pool (default is 5).

• login: MongoDB login name

This call throws a badarg error in case it cannot setup the pool otherwise it returns true.

insert

Insert the provided document (or list of documents) into the collection.

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool to use for this statement.

• collection: Name of a MongoDB collection.

• doc_or_docs: A single Lua table or a Lua array containing multiple Lua tables.

The provided document can set the document id using the _id key. If the id isn't provided one gets autogenerated. The call returns the inserted document(s) or throws a badarg error if it cannot insert the document(s).

update

Updates all documents in the collection that match the given selector.

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool to use for this statement.

• collection: Name of a MongoDB collection.

• selector: A single Lua table containing the filter properties.

The call returns true or throws a badarg error if it cannot update the document(s).

delete

Deletes all documents in the collection that match the given selector.

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool to use for this statement.

• collection: Name of a MongoDB collection.

• selector: A single Lua table containing the filter properties.

The call returns true or throws a badarg error if it cannot delete the document(s).

find

Finds all documents in the collection that match the given selector.

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool to use for this statement.

• collection: Name of a MongoDB collection.

• selector: A single Lua table containing the filter properties.

The call returns a MongoDB cursor or throws a badarg error if it cannot setup the iterator.

next

Fetches next available document given a cursor object obtained via find.

The call returns the next available document or false if all documents have been fetched.

take

Fetches the next nr_of_docs documents given a cursor object obtained via find.

The call returns a Lua array containing the documents or false if all documents have been fetched.

close

Closes and cleans up a cursor object obtained via find.

The call returns true.

find_one

Finds the first document in the collection that matches the given selector.

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool to use for this statement.

• collection: Name of a MongoDB collection.

• selector: A single Lua table containing the filter properties.

The call returns the matched document or false in case no document was found.

Redis

ensure_pool

Ensures that the connection pool named config.pool_id is setup in the system. The config argument is a Lua table holding the following keys:

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool (mandatory).

• size: Size of the connection pool (default is 5).

• password: Redis password for login.

This call throws a badarg error in case it cannot setup the pool otherwise it returns true.

cmd

Executes the given Redis command.

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool

• command: Redis command string.

• args...: Extra args.

This call returns a Lua table, true, false, or nil. In case it cannot parse the command a badarg error is thrown.

Memcached

ensure_pool

Ensures that the pool named config.pool_id is setup in the system, The config argument is a lua table holding the following keys:

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool (mandatory).

• size: Size of the connection pool (default is 5).

• host: Host name for the Memcached server (default is localhost)

This call throws a badarg error in case it cannot setup the pool otherwise it returns true.

flush_all(pool_id)

Flushes all data from the Memcached server. Use with care.

Returns true.

get(pool_id, key)

Get data for key key.

Returns the data for the key and otherwise false.

set(pool_id, key, value, expiration)

Unconditionally set a value for a key.

• key: Key.

• value: Value.

• expiration time until key/value pair is deleted in seconds. This

  parameter is optional with default value 0

Returns value.

add(pool_id, key, value, expiration)

Add a key/value pair if the key doesn't already exist.

• key: Key.

• value: Value.

• expiration time until key/value pair is deleted in seconds. This

  parameter is optional with default value 0

Returns value if key didn't already exist, false otherwise.

replace(pool_id, key, value, expiration)

Replace a key/value pair if the key already exists.

• key: Key.

• value: Value.

• expiration time until key/value pair is deleted in seconds. This

  parameter is optional with default value 0

Returns value if key already exists, false otherwise.

delete(pool_id, key)

Delete key and the associated value.

Returns true if the key/value pair was deleted, false otherwise

HTTP and Json Client Libraries

HTTP Client

ensure_pool

Ensures that the connection pool named config.pool_id is setup in the system. The config argument is a Lua table holding the following keys:

• pool_id: Name of the connection pool (mandatory).

• size: Size of the connection pool (default is 10).

This call throws a badarg error in case it cannot setup the pool otherwise it returns true.

get, put, post, delete

Executes a HTTP request with the given url and args.

• url: A valid http url.

• body: optional body to be included in the request.

• headers: optional Lua table containing extra headers to be included in the request.

This call returns false in case of an error or a Lua table of the form:

body

Fetches the response body given a client ref obtained via the response Lua table.

This call returns false in case of an error or the response body.

JSON

encode

Encodes a Lua value to a JSON string.

This call returns false if it cannot encode the given value.

decode

Decodes a JSON string to a Lua value.

This call returns false if it cannot decode the JSON string.

Logger

Uses the VerneMQ logging infrastructure to log the given log_string.