VerneMQ: A Distributed MQTT Broker

This project is a fork of the awesome ❤️ MQTT broker of the same name. We wanted to add some functionalities that we think can be useful for specific use-cases.

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. VerneMQ is the reliable message hub for your IoT platform or smart products.

VerneMQ is an Apache2 licensed distributed MQTT broker, developed in Erlang.

MQTT used to stand for MQ Telemetry Transport, but it no longer is an acronym. It is an extremely simple and lightweight publish/subscribe messaging protocol, that was invented at IBM and Arcom (now Eurotech) to connect restricted devices in low bandwidth, high-latency or unreliable networks.

VerneMQ implements the MQTT 3.1, 3.1.1 and 5.0 specifications. Currently the following features are implemented and delivered as part of VerneMQ:

On top of the following core VerneMQ features, this fork provides:

• Redis based subscription store
• TCP based events relay hook
• JWT based authentication
• Enhanced ACL
• Disable persistence in messages across restarts

Core VerneMQ features:

• QoS 0, QoS 1, QoS 2
• Basic Authentication and Authorization
• Bridge Support
• $SYS Tree for monitoring and reporting
• TLS (SSL) Encryption
• Websockets Support
• Cluster Support
• Logging (Console, Files, Syslog)
• Reporting to Graphite
• Extensible Plugin architecture
• Multiple Sessions per ClientId
• Session Balancing
• Shared subscriptions
• Message load regulation
• Message load shedding (for system protection)
• Offline Message Storage (based on LevelDB)
• Queue can handle messages FIFO or LIFO style.
• MongoDB auth & integration
• Redis auth & integration
• MySQL auth & integration
• PostgreSQL auth & integration
• CockroachDB auth & integration
• Memcached integration
• HTTP Webhooks
• PROXY Protocol v2
• Administration HTTP API
• Real-time MQTT session tracing
• Full multitenancy
• Cluster status web page

The following features are also applies to MQTT 5.0 clients:

• Enhanced authentication schemes (AUTH)
• Message expiration
• Last Will and Testament delay
• Shared subscriptions
• Request/response flow
• Topic aliases
• Flow control
• Subscription flags (Retain as Published, No Local, Retain Handling)
• Subscriber identifiers
• All property types are supported: user properties, reason strings, content types etc.

Quick Start

This section assumes that you have a copy of the VerneMQ source tree. To get started, you need to first build VerneMQ.

Building VerneMQ

Note: VerneMQ requires Erlang/OTP 21.2 or newer and libsnappy-dev installed in your system.

Assuming you have a working Erlang installation, building VerneMQ should be as simple as:

$ cd $VERNEMQ
$ make rel

Starting VerneMQ

Once you've successfully built VerneMQ, you can start the server with the following commands:

$ cd $VERNEMQ/_build/default/rel/vernemq
$ bin/vernemq start

If VerneMQ is running it is possible to check the status on http://localhost:8888/status and it should look something like:

Note that the $VERNEMQ/_build/default/rel/vernemq directory is a complete, self-contained instance of VerneMQ and Erlang. It is strongly suggested that you move this directory outside the source tree if you plan to run a production instance.